Nicholas Bodley recently said:

> 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.

The Electronic Font Foundry produced the "Edward" series of fonts some years
back to help produce materials to teach handwriting. A little utility
converted the typed text into characters within the font. (This is back in
the one character one glyph days.) You have a choice of style for some
letters. The software selects a suitable letter e depending on context.
Apart from that the letter forms are constant but with over thirty different
glyphs between them to do the joins from letter to letter. I imagine with
modern font technology this could all be automatic.

Tim

--
Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer