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by bsder 197 days ago
> No matter what fancy things you do with superscripts and subscripts, you're not going to be able to do even basic things you need for equations like use a fraction bar, or parentheses that grow in height to match the content inside them.

Why not? Things like Arabic ligatures already do that, no?
2 comments
bruce343434 196 days ago
Arabic ligatures? Do you mean the unicode point for the basmala for instance? That's pretty "hardcoded", I think math requires more composability
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austinjp 197 days ago
This is interesting to me, but I am very naive about this. Can you explain, or point to where I could learn more?
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bsder 196 days ago
I'd start with HarfBuzz: https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz

That's the open source font shaping engine. It does a lot of work to handle font shaping and rendering for languages that can't really be reduced to characters.

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