Comment by xg15
7 months ago
> The font shaping engine Harfbuzz, used in applications such as Firefox and Chrome, comes with a Wasm shaper allowing arbitrary code to be used to "shape" text.
Has there already been a proposal to add scripting functionality to Unicode itself? Seems to me we're not very far from that anymore...
Considering the actual complexity of rendering e.g. Urdu in decent, native-looking way you presumably do want some Turing-complete capabilities at least in some cases, cf "One handwritten Urdu newspaper, The Musalman, is still published daily in Chennai.[232] InPage, a widely used desktop publishing tool for Urdu, has over 20,000 ligatures in its Nastaʿliq computer fonts." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu#Writing_system)
Edit—the OP uses this exact use case, Urdu typesetting, to justify WASM in Harfbuzz (video around 6:00); seems like Urdu has really become the posterchild for typographic complexity these days
To Unicode? Good god please no. Unicode is just codepoints. I shudder to think what adding scripting support to that would even mean.
Maybe you meant adding it to OpenType?
I was being sarcastic, but yes, I meant unicode...
Sometimes you just can't tell, you know... OK, my sanity is restored, thanks. :)
You mean encoding executable code in plain text files, that execute when you open them? No, that seems unnecessary and very insecure.
Unicode OS when?
No, because Unicode doesn't concern itself with rendering, it's just for codepoints.
That sounds disgusting.