Re: Ligatures

[Pip Cet]

On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 7:40 PM Clément Pit-Claudel
<address@hidden> wrote:
> > And this is where it gets back to "let's not hardcode the dependency
> > on Harfbuzz and FreeType, because other backends might actually give
> > us the information we need".
>
> Harfbuzz can give us this info: hb_ot_layout_get_ligature_carets

Thanks, I hadn't looked there!

So Harfbuzz provides a non-core API which, after a separate call for
each cluster, allows us to split up a glyph into non-overlapping
bounding boxes of the same height (the information returned is
one-dimensional, and intended for carets, not for Emacs-style box
cursors).

I don't see how that API design is so great we should hardcode
dependencies on it, though I do agree it's sufficient to work with.

Again, this isn't about some exotic use case: I open a buffer, type
"ffi", and hit C-b twice. What should happen?

AFAIU, people are still seriously considering the possibility that all
of "ffi" would be covered by the cursor. I hope I'm misunderstanding
that, because it's so obviously the wrong thing to do in this case.