It finally came to the front of my consciousness that all the work done
for Arabic shaping and joining should be useful, with appropriate fonts,
for rendering latin script. Afaik, all present script fonts require
careful design to hide the glyph joins. I know essentially nothing about
the details of shaping and joining routines (software pieces), but I
suspect that much of the hard part has already been done.

Unfortunately, fonts for such use are likely to require extensions of
existing standards, perhaps specifying permissible locations on each glyph
for joining, as well as initial, medial, final and standalone forms, and
perhaps other data.

===

Another scheme would have lots of kerning pairs with joins appropriate to
the specfic letter forms of each pair. Each pair might contain information
about best connections to preceding and following letters.

In either case, the font scheme should be sufficiently general to
accommodate many different styles -- script fonts.

{Sorry--haven't been reading Q much, lately; not for lack of interest in
its topic, and even the recent battle. The Libranet Linux list recently
had a "Please stop!-category" long and unhappy thread, so it's not only
Qalam, by a long shot, seems to me.}

My best to all,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath