Shriramana Sharma wrote:

I was just noting that the glyph tables themselves don't *use* the actual codepoints of the characters getting ligated (while they *refer* to them).

Characters are mapped to glyph IDs in the font cmap tables.

Glyph IDs are mapped to other glyph IDs (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, or one-to-one-of-many) in the layout GSUB table.

No! See Behdad's post -- it is clearly said that the lookup will still be in logical order (1001, 1012) -> (1540) and not in visual order as you say.

I think there may be some confusion in this discussion over what constitutes 'visual order'. I try to avoid the term because it is difficult for right-to-left readers to accustom themselves to thinking of visual order as anything other than right-to-left. I prefer the term 'reading order' or 'resolved order', i.e. resolved bidi and script shaping order, which may have involved integrated reordering (reordering within the glyph processing) as in the case of Indic scripts.

Nope -- they are placed in the lookup table in *logical* order. IIUC the entire sequence of glyphs is only reordered from RTL at the very end. Peter or Behdad, can you corroborate this?

Glyph ID inputs for OTL processing are according to reading/resolved order. This is typically the same as logical order, but the term logical order really applies to character strings, not glyph strings, which are much more maleable. The order of input strings in GSUB lookups or contexts is dependent not only on the underlying character order, but also on the results of previous GSUB lookups. So while, unlike AAT and Graphite, OpenType Layout doesn't explicitly provide for glyph re-ordering, some kinds of glyph reordering are possible using sequences of contextual lookups to duplicate a glyph in a second location in the string and then remove the first instance. We use this in some Devanagari fonts to enable subsequent ligation of short ikar variants to the left of a consonant base with reph marks to the right of that base.

JH



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