Comment by roughly
6 hours ago
That’s incredible. I’m always impressed with the utility of the TrueType/open font spec - the flexibility there is really an underappreciated work of engineering genius.
6 hours ago
That’s incredible. I’m always impressed with the utility of the TrueType/open font spec - the flexibility there is really an underappreciated work of engineering genius.
Arguably one of those cases where the capability is awesome, but using the capability is wat.
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
I mean, fonts are Turing-complete [0], so it isn’t surprising that this is possible. Turing-completeness is often by accident rather than by genius [1].
[0] https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness#Unintentio...
Which makes sense, because human language is apparently Turing complete, so anything intended to represent it faithfully would wind up with that characteristic, too.
Human language isn’t a formal language, so this is a category error.
In the present context, an example is that the common reading of a Kanji word isn’t always well-defined, and neither is the decomposition of a sequence of Kanji characters into words.
5 replies →
Bitmap fonts aren't turing complete. The fact that TrueType is built with an arbitrary virtual machine is insane, makes implementations ridiculously complex, and is a huge security liability. The purpose of the VM wasn't to "represent human language faithfully" but to make fonts look a little better when displayed at a variety of resolutions, via hinting. Hinting doesn't necessarily require a full VM, but somebody let the engineers have a little too much fun.
6 replies →