Font Direction Hint Setting

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Lusavia
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Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2018 2:28 pm

Font Direction Hint Setting

Post by Lusavia »

Please tell me where the font direction hint setting lives now in 11.5 pro edition. Need to set font as right to left and below info references an old version I assume - I see no option under properties. Thanks.

https://www.high-logic.com/fontcreator/ ... rview.html
Erwin Denissen
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Re: Font Direction Hint Setting

Post by Erwin Denissen »

That property is removed as it is deprecated in the specs, thus no longer important.

A text layout engine will determine the text direction based on the characters.
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Lusavia
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Re: Font Direction Hint Setting

Post by Lusavia »

Thanks much for the reply.
Lusavia
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2018 2:28 pm

Re: Font Direction Hint Setting

Post by Lusavia »

Any suggestions of what I can do in fc to get a text layout engine to recognize RTL direction? Change a panose value?

Font in question contains non-connecting rtl characters (like Hebrew for example). I've tried deselecting anything identifying characters as Latin but nothing is working.
Erwin Denissen
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Re: Font Direction Hint Setting

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Ensure you use characters that are defined as right-to-left in Unicode. For example $05D5 HEBREW LETTER VAV.
Erwin Denissen
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Lusavia
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Re: Font Direction Hint Setting

Post by Lusavia »

I can't do that, they're custom characters in the private use range (this case ED00 ...). So I need to know what field/value these text engines read that tells them font direction. There's no unicode subrange in private use area devoted to RTL so something besides codepoint itself must relay this info. Thanks again.
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Re: Font Direction Hint Setting

Post by Erwin Denissen »

This information is not stored within fonts, but defined by the Unicode consortium.

You could start your text with the right-to-left override (RLO) character (code point $202E) which tells the word processing engine to process the remaining characters from right to left (RTL).

Here is the text "hello world!" preceded with this special character:

‏‮hello world!

As soon as a new line is detected this override stops.

You might want to read more about the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm.
Erwin Denissen
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Lusavia
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Re: Font Direction Hint Setting

Post by Lusavia »

Great! Thanks for the good info Erwin,I'll do that.
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