On 2/2/14 01:13, Khaled Hosny wrote:
Hi,
Someone reported an issue with the hireq placement under the yodh with
Ezra SIL font[1]. When I checked this, it seemed to be because HarfBuzz
is composing U+05D9 + U+05B4 to U+FB1D and the font has a glyph for
U+FB1D that has a not so good placement for hireq.
I thought this composition is result of Unicode normalisation, so
HarfBuzz is doing the right thing, but the comment in
hb-ot-shape-complex-hebrew.cc:75 indicates otherwise. I’m no very sure,
but I feel this kind of composition should fits more into fallback
shaping like done with Arabic and not something to be done
unconditionally, WDYT?
This is a difficult call. Note that U+FB1D does have a canonical
decomposition to <U+05D9, U+05B4>; the comment in
hb-ot-shape-complex-hebrew.cc relates only to the fact that these Hebrew
presentation forms are excluded from the composition rules for NFC;
thus, both NFC and NFD representations use the decomposed sequence.
Nevertheless, the two representations *are* canonically equivalent, and
therefore it's appropriate that they should be rendered the same.
IMO, this is a font bug in Ezra SIL; if a font has positioning rules for
yod + hireq, and also has a precomposed yod-hireq glyph, the two should
look identical. A font that gives the impression that entering U+FB1D
will result in one appearance, while <U+05D9, U+05B4> will result in
something different, is misleading its users.
As for what harfbuzz should do: currently, it deliberately uses the
precomposed Hebrew presentation-form glyphs, because there are many
(generally older) fonts out there that lack good (or any) mark
positioning rules, and so decomposed sequences look terrible. Using the
presentation forms gives a much better result.
However, perhaps we should try to be more sophisticated, and do
something like "compose to the presentation forms if the font doesn't
have GPOS mark positioning; otherwise prefer decomposed sequences".
JK
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