Re: Arabic letters separated by markup

From: Erik van der Poel (erik@vanderpoel.org)
Date: Mon Jun 13 2005 - 15:06:27 CDT

  • Next message: Mark Davis: "Re: Arabic letters separated by markup"

    >> 4. Obligatory ligatures MUST NOT be broken if the formatting rules
    >> introduce no extra space between the affected characters, even
    >> if this means some of the characters are rendered in the wrong
    >> font or as part of the wrong visual element.
    >
    > Perhaps the spec could say that an implementation MAY honor such things
    > as a color change (which may not be possible in current font
    > technologies such as OpenType?)

    It should be possible to implement multi-color obligatory ligatures by
    creating 2 or more glyphs for each ligature, possibly with kerning. I
    haven't checked to see whether any APIs can kern across runs or change
    colors within a run, but that's a separate issue.

    >> 5. Combining characters MUST be rendered as the combined grapheme
    >> cluster if the system is capable of rendering the combination,
    >> even if this means some of the characters are rendered in the
    >> wrong font or as part of the wrong visual element. The combined
    >> grapheme cluster SHOULD be rendered as part of the base
    >> character's element, or, in the case of combining jamos, the
    >> initial character's element.
    >
    > Here again, shouldn't the style rules trump the Unicode rules?
    > Otherwise, why should we even allow tags to be inserted between such
    > characters?

    Perhaps tags would be inserted between such characters for reasons other
    than style. I.e. some other semantic. So if there is no style change
    across the tag(s), the characters should be combined and presented in
    the usual way.

    If there is a style change across the tag(s) but the implementation
    cannot honor it, it's hard to say whether the author considers that
    style change (e.g. color) to be more important than the normal
    presentation of the character sequence.

    We are talking about rather strange cases here, so the implementors
    might not get around to implementing them soon even if the specs were
    embellished.

    Erik



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