After the Ngapi hackfest work, we were assuming that fonts
won't use presentation features to choose specific forms
(eg. conjuncts). As such, we were using auto-joiner behavior
for such features. It proved to be troublesome as many fonts
used presentation forms ('pres') for example to form conjuncts,
which need to be disabled when a ZWJ is inserted.
Two examples:
U+0D2F,U+200D,U+0D4D,U+0D2F with kartika.ttf
U+0995,U+09CD,U+200D,U+09B7 with vrinda.ttf
What we do now is to never do magic to ZWJ during GSUB's main input
match for Indic-style shapers. Note that backtrack/lookahead are still
matched liberally, as is GPOS. This seems to be an acceptable
compromise.
As to the bug that initially started this work, that one needs to
be fixed differently:
Bug 58714 - Kannada u+0cb0 u+200d u+0ccd u+0c95 u+0cbe does not
provide same results as Windows8
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58714
New numbers:
BENGALI: 353689 out of 354188 tests passed. 499 failed (0.140886%)
DEVANAGARI: 707305 out of 707394 tests passed. 89 failed (0.0125814%)
GUJARATI: 366349 out of 366457 tests passed. 108 failed (0.0294714%)
GURMUKHI: 60706 out of 60747 tests passed. 41 failed (0.067493%)
KANNADA: 951030 out of 951913 tests passed. 883 failed (0.0927606%)
KHMER: 299070 out of 299124 tests passed. 54 failed (0.0180527%)
LAO: 53611 out of 53644 tests passed. 33 failed (0.0615167%)
MALAYALAM: 1048102 out of 1048334 tests passed. 232 failed (0.0221304%)
ORIYA: 42320 out of 42329 tests passed. 9 failed (0.021262%)
SINHALA: 271666 out of 271847 tests passed. 181 failed (0.0665816%)
TAMIL: 1091753 out of 1091754 tests passed. 1 failed (9.15957e-05%)
TELUGU: 970555 out of 970573 tests passed. 18 failed (0.00185457%)
TIBETAN: 208469 out of 208469 tests passed. 0 failed (0%)
With this in place, you can remove GDEF/GSUB/GPOS tables from Arabic
fonts and still get per-component marks positioned on
oh-yeah-fallback-formed LAM-ALEF ligatures with marks in between the LAM
and ALEF.
Now *that*'s pretty cool, if a bit anachronistic...
Behdad Esfahbod