Re: Ligatures (was: Unify the Platforms: Cairo+FreeType+Harfbuzz Everywhere (except TTY))

[Pip Cet]

On Sat, May 23, 2020 at 7:50 AM Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
> See the discussion starting here:
>
>   https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/harfbuzz/2020-May/007486.html

Thanks for the links!

> and my conclusion in
>
>   https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/harfbuzz/2020-May/007491.html

You write: "(b) is not really feasible without redesigning the entire
Emacs display engine". I don't see how that's true at all. All we need
is some limited look-ahead.

But, yes, the Emacs display engine does need to be drastically altered
or redesigned. I'm not denying that, though I'm not surprised no one's
really volunteering to do so, for reasons that should be fairly
obvious.

(And I really think this has to be seen in the context of kerning, as well.)

I think at the heart of it, it's about whether we treat fonts like
pieces of software, to be given a specific task and fixed if they fail
to perform it, or as bitmaps for simulating a TTY. Fonts are software:
they're written in a weird limited language, but essentially they're
programs to measure and display characters as glyphs.