Either I have not made myself clear or my understanding of the rendering process is even less than I thought. Perhaps I should have said "glyph" rather than "character". But the real point is that I am suggesting some kind of flag which could be preserved from outputting on glyph to outputting the next, on the lines of "the last glyph I output was a vowel" or "... a consonant" - with "vowel" or "consonant" defined simply as one of a particular list of glyphs or combinations. Is that possible, or is the rendering engine unable to preserve any kind of state from glyph to glyph?
It is possible to store information about a glyph for processing purposes. In OpenType this is done in the GDEF table, but the glyph types are currently limited to simple, ligature, mark and component. It is not essential to make such assignments much of the time; for example, you only need to classify a ligature as such if you want to position marks relative to different parts of the ligature (in which case you also define how many components the ligature has. The only GDEF classification currently necessary for Hebrew is 'mark'. If you wanted the GDEF table specification extended for, e.g. a distinction between consonants and vowels, you would need to approach MS and Adobe. I really don't recommend doing that at this stage, since this really is a problem that should be solveable at the text encoding level. The OpenType philosophy is very much opposed to handling anything that looks like a character processing issue in glyph space (unlike AAT and Graphite).
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The sight of James Cox from the BBC's World at One,
interviewing Robin Oakley, CNN's man in Europe,
surrounded by a scrum of furiously scribbling print
journalists will stand for some time as the apogee of
media cannibalism.
- Emma Brockes, at the EU summit
