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Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Getting it Right with Wordwrapping in Syllabics


What does that mean? Well... bad luck for languages that use a non-Roman writing system. Lots of syllabic fonts are based on remapping the roman symbols to syllabic symbols. That means that letter 'a' becomes one syllabic symbol, 'b' another one, etc.
Text processing is based on rules. Let's consider wordwrapping: in English, you can split 'dual-purpose' on two lines: 'dual-', then new line, then 'purpose'. In French you can split 'dedans/dehors' the same way. What happens if roman '-' and '/' were mapped to some syllabic symbols that have nothing to do with punctuation? You get wrong wordwrapping: a word gets split where it should not get split.
We designed a wordwrapping module for syllabics, splitting words the right way.
The screenshot show the original (and incorrect) wordwrapping in yellow field 'Definition': as syllabic 'vaa' (last symbol of 1st line) is mapped to roman '/', the software wraps the word after the 'vaa'. The green field shows that the word containing the 'vaa' does not get split, but gets sent as a whole to the next line.

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