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| ▲ | roughly 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Which makes sense, because human language is apparently Turing complete, so anything intended to represent it faithfully would wind up with that characteristic, too. | | |
| ▲ | layer8 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | | |
| ▲ | anonymous908213 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | roughly 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | And yet, actually mapping all written human languages and their ligatures, variations, etc, seems to require this level of complexity. So the choice is either you draw the line and decide which languages you consider legitimate or not, or you build a machine of sufficient complexity to capture all languages, and the tradeoff, I suppose, is how much knowledge you want to actually be able to capture in your computerized system. | | |
| ▲ | anonymous908213 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Unicode is distinct from, and completely unrelated to, TrueType. Unicode does not require a virtual machine to interpret. You can simply express languages and their variations with Unicode + bitmap fonts. | | |
| ▲ | roughly 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Unless you want ligatures. | | |
| ▲ | anonymous908213 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do you really believe the only way to implement ligatures is with a virtual machine? Dumb and dirty psuedocode written in 5 seconds of thinking about it but come on, this is not that complicated. for each character in text
characterToPrint = Parse(character)
if character is LigatureStartCandidate
characterToPrint = LookAheadForNextLigatureCandidateAndResolve(character)
Print(characterToPrint)
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| ▲ | roughly 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | And you've now gotten 92% of the way there. Iterate a few dozen more times to get up to 97%, 98%, 99%, etc., and eventually you'll have rewritten OpenType. | | |
| ▲ | anonymous908213 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Would you like to elaborate on those few dozen more cases rather than handwaving them away? Embedding a VM into a font format is foundationally a ridiculous idea and should require real justification, although I know our industry is in love with anything that allows arbitrary code execution exploits. |
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