On 11/5/15, 10:44 PM, "Harbs" <harbs.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >On Nov 6, 2015, at 1:01 AM, jude <flexcapaci...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> How did the TLF engineers figure this out? > >I think you just need to know and know people who know. Microsoft’s site >has some great info, but it’s scattered all over the place. I learned a >lot some years ago when I was working on creating some fonts. I spent a >lot of time with VOLT and Microsoft’s OpenType pages. That gave me a >pretty solid background on OpenType features. Playing with AFTKO added to >that. Taking apart a Devanagari font was very instructive as well. I’m >well versed in Hebrew and have enough exposure to Arabic to be familiar >with those issues. I have a colleague in Japan who is my go-to for >Japanese issues as well as some people I know in the US who are Japanese >experts. What isn’t clear to me is that there is something about text layout to be “figured out”. I’m not convinced there is a “best practice” for text layout that covers international, effects, character positioning that isn’t on a horizontal line, etc. Many of the folks who worked on Adobe InDesign came from Adobe/Aldus PageMaker and had learned a lot, probably the hard way, about text layout. And while lots of those lessons were carried over to InDesign and TLF, it isn’t clear that TLF is the best possible implementation of text layout. Like you said it has some strange concepts (at least to me) like Slugs and Parcels. Maybe traditional type-setters used those concepts, maybe not. It isn’t clear the TLF truly took into account the need to render HTML. Look at the struggles in trying to implement Table support in TLF. I believe there is still a performance issue related to the table work. Anyway, for FlexJS, the only thing I really want regarding text layout is for the customer to have choices. There should be multiple text layout SWCS that have various trade-offs along the lines that Harbs described. We don’t want to require a particular text layout library. I still don’t understand why text layout isn’t a “simple” rectangles-on-a-path problem. But that’s probably just me. -Alex
