Re: character-spacing & cursively-connected characters

[Damon Chaplin <damon karuna uklinux net>]

On Thu, 2003-02-13 at 00:09, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-02-13 at 01:53, Damon Chaplin wrote:
> > 
> > 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.
> > 
> 
> How can word-spacing "fail" ?

If only one word fits on the line there may be no spaces to expand.

The TeX algorithm also tries very hard not to stretch spaces above a
certain ratio. So this is another sort of failure case.

Damon