Hacker News: khaled

New comment by khaled in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

khaled — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:20:43 +0000

Numbers below 100 are always read from right to left even in vernacular/informal/dialectical Arabic.

New comment by khaled in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

khaled — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:16:36 +0000

There is no unjoined form of Arabic. The Arabic script became Arabic when Nabataean script started developing joined letter forms. Unjoined Nabatean is as foreign to Arabic as Phoenician is to Greek.

HarfBuzz Study: Caching

khaled — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 18:46:08 +0000

Article URL: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_VgObf6Je0J8byMLsi7HCQHnKo2emGnx_ib_sHo-bt4/edit?usp=sharing

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43560022

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by khaled in "TeX and Typst: Layout Models (2024)"

khaled — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 20:20:00 +0000

> I don't think it generates better results

It does if one is doing typesetting math-heavy documents. Nothing really matches TeX quality or flexibility in math typesetting, not even typst (yet, at least).

New comment by khaled in "Debian opens a can of username worms"

khaled — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 20:24:11 +0000

> And unicode is an evolving standard where this normalisation sometimes changes between standards

Unicode normalization is subject to its stability policy, and Unicode no longer allow adding new canonically equivalent code points.

https://www.unicode.org/policies/stability_policy.html

New comment by khaled in "Making the Tibetan language a first-class citizen in the digital world"

khaled — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 14:58:25 +0000

One reason that comes to mind, is to make sure no extra text is inserted in the empty space e.g. after a contract is signed.

New comment by khaled in "Making the Tibetan language a first-class citizen in the digital world"

khaled — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 06:36:22 +0000

In some countries, legal documents are required to not have any paragraph breaks, so you can have a document with one paragraph spanning 100s of pages. OpenOffice has a hard limit of 65534 per paragraph, and it took LibreOffice quite some work to left it: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30668

New comment by khaled in "Making the Tibetan language a first-class citizen in the digital world"

khaled — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 06:25:23 +0000

The fix looks like a 5 line fix because it is a last step in a very long process of optimizing LibreOffice text layout that started years ago. This 5 line fix could not have been possible 10 years ago simply because the code it is fixing didn't exist back then.

Advances in font technology and GTK text rendering

khaled — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 05:48:34 +0000

Article URL: https://lwn.net/Articles/987176/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41528329

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by khaled in "State of Text Rendering 2024"

khaled — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 05:37:27 +0000

This is still not rasterization, but a way to modify glyph outlines on the fly. How they are rasterized eventually should be mostly unchanged.

New comment by khaled in "LibreOffice 24.2 Will Succeed LibreOffice 7.6"

khaled — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 09:31:43 +0000

For some weird reason, printing defaulted to printing only selected text, but this is finally fixed https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=139164

Shaping the Future of Typography: embedded WASM in fonts and more

khaled — Fri, 12 May 2023 12:14:40 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@paszkowska.marianna/shaping-the-future-of-typography-an-exploration-of-opentype-2-0-enhancements-and-impact-355d691b3bbe

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35915066

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by khaled in "Help! Is This Arabic?"

khaled — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 08:25:29 +0000

In Arabic, Mercury (planet) and mercury (element) are two different words (عطارد and زئبق), here the machine translation is using the wrong mercury for the context.

New comment by khaled in "Help! Is This Arabic?"

khaled — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 07:15:36 +0000

Photoshop relatively recently consolidated its text layout into a single layout engine (based on HarfBuzz) and Arabic support no longer an opt-in (which was the source of the trouble, you had to know you need to opt-in Arabic support before installing the application)

https://helpx.adobe.com/lv/photoshop/using/unified-text-engi...

New comment by khaled in "Help! Is This Arabic?"

khaled — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 07:10:36 +0000

That is not the point I’m making, rather a single person is responsible for how most of software render text in most of the world writing systems and no one is wondering how 6 billion people on this planet so much depend on the work of “this one guy”. It is because text layout is something 99% of software developers can’t do right if their lives depended on it (same for anything that involves the irregularities of human nature, software developers are not cut for this).

New comment by khaled in "Help! Is This Arabic?"

khaled — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 06:39:23 +0000

There is 99% chance the software you are reading text on right now uses HarfBuzz to lay out the text, a library written mainly by a Persian person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarfBuzz

New comment by khaled in "Fonts – 2022 – The Web Almanac by HTTP Archive"

khaled — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 11:02:15 +0000

Font usage on the web, 2022 edition.

Fonts – 2022 – The Web Almanac by HTTP Archive

khaled — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 11:02:15 +0000

Article URL: https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2022/fonts

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32993737

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by khaled in "Color fonts on Google Fonts"

khaled — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 22:44:52 +0000

Reem Kufi designer here, that is the original form of ع in Arabic and the only form used in manuscript Kufi. Kufi-inspired typefaces often use the more familiar form from later calligraphic styles. Reem Kufi has an alternate form as well, but it is not the default.

HarfBuzz Study: hb-ITER, C++20 Ranges-like abstraction

khaled — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 19:35:44 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/behdadesfahbod/status/1555622626147438592

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32360906

Points: 1

# Comments: 0