Rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt, an interactive introduction(lr0.org)
lr0.org
Rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt, an interactive introduction
https://lr0.org/blog/p/arabic/
3 comments
Had to swap stanzas around to fit in the charlimit
this being so heavily edited by AI significantly sours the otherwise very interesting topic
I have my own experience with a similar issue as I work with regular expressions in multiple languages. Getting the cursor to behave while mixing RtL and LtR is a nightmare, and it's always a guess whether the regex engine will evaluate the text correctly. There's also the struggle between forms that look identical but are different unicode points e.g. between Persian and Arabic, as well as the issues with Persian zero-width non-joiners (ZWNJ) which are optional in the language but can look invisible (or nearly so) to the eye.
These are genuinely difficult technical challenges and I understand that there's no quick fix. But I wish there was more of a drive to solve them, rather than the default English-over-everything approach that's so common.