Re: Shaping and joining for latin alphabetic script?

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Nicholas Bodley" <nbodley@...> wrote:

>
> 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.

> 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.

Are there standards for complex scripts? There's nothing in the open
type font specification that prevents 'simple scripts' from doing
these things, but there *may* be a script-dependent limit on how much
attention the graphics engine pays to the information in the fonts.

Richard.