character-spacing & cursively-connected characters

[Damon Chaplin <damon karuna uklinux net>]

Is it possible to determine if 2 clusters are cursively-connected?
(i.e. the glyphs are joined up in some way.)

I think in some scripts like Arabic nearly all clusters are connected,
and you can even get cursive Latin fonts.

I'm thinking of using character spacing in my justification routines,
maybe just as a fallback for when word-spacing fails. But I can't really
do that for cursively-connected clusters.

Damon