Indic text is not always broken at akshara boundaries. What should a HarfBuzz client do if it wishes to render such text? What are the support requirements from the transcriber and a font that can already cope with text only broken at indisputable akshara boundaries?
The reason I ask is that I am trying to preserve line boundaries when transcribing some Tai Tham text written on palm leaf, along with notes in English, in a rich text environment. The application I am using is LibreOffice; it may be that this task is beyond its intended capabilities. If I raise a feature request on LibreOffice, it may help to give some indications of how HarfBuzz should be used in this special case. The text I am transcribing is overwhelmingly in Pali and is written using scriptio continua. There is almost no punctuation. The writer did not comply with Everson's diktat that line-breaking is lexical - it is not even broken at akshara boundaries, but rather at column boundaries. (This was normal practice.) Thus I get the following rendering issues: 1) A line may be broken between a preposed vowel (being Pali, this is always U+1A6E TAI THAM VOWEL SIGN E) and the rest of the akshara. 2) A line may be broken within an akshara between the consonant stack and a trailing vowel. So far this vowel has always been U+1A63 TAI THAM VOWEL SIGN AA; I suspect U+1A64 TAI THAM VOWEL SIGN TALL AA would not make sense at the start of a line. I expect to encounter the following similar, additional issue: 3) A line may be broken between U+1A58 TAI THAM SIGN MAI KANG LAI at the end of an akshara and the next akshara, for in this text U+1A58 behaves not as Consonant_Final but as Consonant_Preceding_Repha. How should the resultant dotted circles be suppressed? I do not wish their suppression to introduce spaces. I would prefer the font to be compatible with the native renderers of Windows 10, MacOs and iOS. Richard. _______________________________________________ HarfBuzz mailing list [email protected] https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/harfbuzz
