⋮What⋮ ⋮is⋮ ⋮a⋮ ⋮Type⋮set⋮ting⋮-⋮Stack⋮?

Published at November 20, 2021 ·  7 min read

The other day I had reason to think about what actually comprises a typesetting stack. Typesetting allows the documents you compiled to be read on a output medium. For this post I’ll focus on screen-output. Other have tried to give a systematic overview of what typesetting is. Nevertheless, I’ll jot down my own attempt, focussing on UAX, i.e. the Unicode recommendations and algorithms for various aspects of text segmentation. A Walk through the Layout Process It’s clear that the rules of various Unicode annexes play an important role during typsetting....

⋮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....