Re: character-spacing & cursively-connected characters

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2003-02-12 at 19:53, Damon Chaplin wrote:
> Is it possible to determine if 2 clusters are cursively-connected?
> (i.e. the glyphs are joined up in some way.)

No, I don't think font formats contain the necessary information
usually. (You can tell sometimes for OpenType fonts, since there
is a special positioning type for cursive attachments, but that
probably isn't going to be used in most cases.)

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

Arabic doesn't matter much because you are justifying via
Kashida insertion. A line without Kashida insertion points
or word spaces is pretty much going to be a single character.

Cursive Latin fonts are pretty much intractable without information
from the font.

> 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.

I think when word-spacing fails, it's probably best to just leave
a gap at the edge of the line.

Regards,
                                 Owen