khaled

Numbers below 100 are always read from right to left even in vernacular/informal/dialectical Arabic.

There is no unjoined form of Arabic. The Arabic script became Arabic when Nabataean script started developing joined letter forms. Unjoined Nabatean is as foreign to Arabic as Phoenician is to Greek.

> I don't think it generates better results

It does if one is doing typesetting math-heavy documents. Nothing really matches TeX quality or flexibility in math typesetting, not even typst (yet, at least).

> And unicode is an evolving standard where this normalisation sometimes changes between standards

Unicode normalization is subject to its stability policy, and Unicode no longer allow adding new canonically equivalent code points.

https://www.unicode.org/policies/stability_policy.html

One reason that comes to mind, is to make sure no extra text is inserted in the empty space e.g. after a contract is signed.

In some countries, legal documents are required to not have any paragraph breaks, so you can have a document with one paragraph spanning 100s of pages. OpenOffice has a hard limit of 65534 per paragraph, and it took LibreOffice quite some work to left it: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30668

The fix looks like a 5 line fix because it is a last step in a very long process of optimizing LibreOffice text layout that started years ago. This 5 line fix could not have been possible 10 years ago simply because the code it is fixing didn't exist back then.

This is still not rasterization, but a way to modify glyph outlines on the fly. How they are rasterized eventually should be mostly unchanged.

For some weird reason, printing defaulted to printing only selected text, but this is finally fixed https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=139164

In Arabic, Mercury (planet) and mercury (element) are two different words (عطارد and زئبق), here the machine translation is using the wrong mercury for the context.

Photoshop relatively recently consolidated its text layout into a single layout engine (based on HarfBuzz) and Arabic support no longer an opt-in (which was the source of the trouble, you had to know you need to opt-in Arabic support before installing the application)

https://helpx.adobe.com/lv/photoshop/using/unified-text-engi...

That is not the point I’m making, rather a single person is responsible for how most of software render text in most of the world writing systems and no one is wondering how 6 billion people on this planet so much depend on the work of “this one guy”. It is because text layout is something 99% of software developers can’t do right if their lives depended on it (same for anything that involves the irregularities of human nature, software developers are not cut for this).

There is 99% chance the software you are reading text on right now uses HarfBuzz to lay out the text, a library written mainly by a Persian person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarfBuzz

Font usage on the web, 2022 edition.

Reem Kufi designer here, that is the original form of ع in Arabic and the only form used in manuscript Kufi. Kufi-inspired typefaces often use the more familiar form from later calligraphic styles. Reem Kufi has an alternate form as well, but it is not the default.

FWIW, libharfbuzz has no hard dependencies at all and it is fully functional when built with all optional dependencies disabled.

Firefox user, no problem here. The OP screenshot has different fonts that the page sets, so looks like both of you have web fonts disabled.

I strand by my comment. Replicate core TeX (and LaTeX) core features is easy (text layout, hyphenation, line breaking, math typesetting, etc. all are solved issue, often with many independent implementation that are as good as TeX‘s if not better), the issues that holds most people are packages and decades of TeX/LaTeX legacy.

I can count like half a dozen TeX/LaTeX alternatives (SILE, Patoline, Platypus, Lout, some are more dead than the others) without even looking them up. It is easy to make a TeX/LaTeX alternative, it is hard to get people to use it.

And if you mean TeX formats, there are no shortage of these https://ctan.org/topic/format.

> It's like doing math in local notation

Math is taught in Arabic, using Arabic notation and written from right to left in many Arabic countries. That is basically the only form of math I’m personally familiar with.

Some low level text libraries (FriBiDi, HarfBuzz) use UTF-32 as it makes code simpler when you have to work on it at code point level. Most code does not need that of course and is better off working as a different level than code points.