AI can probably solve "how do we get good shaper implementations into software", provided a good enough spec and test suite are available, but it won't solve "how do we convince stakeholders to value supporting languages spoken by massive numbers of people", most likely
Internet Explorer 5.5 implements text-justify: kashida. For one brief, weird browser-quarter Microsoft is the only software vendor on earth that can justify Arabic correctly on a screen.
I think he's talking about the rendering algorithm with regards to the stream of text. essentially saying rendering direction should follow reading convention.
on the other hand, in formal arabic, it's not unusual that numers are read in clusters from least significant to most significant (right to left). 1984 would be read : eighty four and nine hundred and a thousand. not sure if the author is aware of this
> rendering direction should follow reading convention.
What does that even mean in this context? In a strictly LTR language, sure, you read left-to-right and the glyphs are rendered left-to-right. But the whole discussion is about bidirectional text, where the text is rendered by a complex algorithm. What is the “rendering direction”?
I know just enough about some RTL languages to know that one can absolutely intersperse RTL text with, say, and English phrase, and you still read the first (leftmost in the group) English sound first and so on :)
if you write (with a pen) text with mixed arabic, numbers, english words. then somebody else gets to read it, he will read arabic from right to left, then when when he encouters a number or an english word, he will naturally jump to the first latin letter of the word and start reading left to right, then jump back to the beginning if the next arabic word and switch back to RTL. the alogorithm should copy that behaviour.
buttons ? knobs ? we are fascinated by machines. It's curiosity about the inner workings of the machine and fascination by the mistery of the closed box. you can observe that in certain kids
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