Bidi: What You See isn't What You Get

Published at February 24, 2021 ·  4 min read

I stumbled across the problem of bidirectional text in terminals while trying to test a variant of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm. The Unicode consortium publishes a set of bidi test-cases, which suffer from being somewhat “non-visual”. At the end of the day you want to deal with real sentences in real languages and scripts. Preparing that, you face a peculiar problem: how do you display your test output? After all, UAX#9 is about visual ordering of characters....

Text vs Strings

Published at January 16, 2021 ·  8 min read

In the unlikely event of a software developer and a typographer attending the same party and—even more unlikely—enganging in some small talk, they certainly are prone to a fundamental disagreement: What is the nature of text? As an IT guy with a heavy interest in typography, I even find me in disagreement with myself, clearly an unhealthy state of mind. As a typographer I may think about beautiful books, fine typecases or craftsmanship in layout, as a bibliophile I may think about inspired literature or enlightened non-fiction, but as a programmer I mainly think of the hassle with UTF-8, emojis, limitations of string libaries and so on....