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)

▲

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.