https://lr0.org/blog/p/arabic/ A beautiful introduction to the intricacies of rendering Arabic typography and how computers fall far short of doing it properly. I love things like this. It is very easy to forget the true complexity the world offers us. To mistake abstractions we've built for the real thing, disconnected from its history. This is a wonderfully written combination of the technical and social.

The acknowledgements and credits alone are worth a read. Wonderful.

The whole stack stands on a small number of people who decided, against the grain of every incentive their professional environment offered them, that the script a few hundred million people read deserved infrastructure, and then sat down and built it for free.

Having just read it, I encounter a real-world* use of such a thing: (not my photo, BBC)

(for context, I studied linguistics, mainly Persian; and I build writing tools) One of the tools I'm making renders text in multiple fading lines (i.e. the text fades as you keep writing). After hours and hours of dealing with BIDI my users are mostly happy with the UX... but I still have my nemesis left: • in some calligraphy styles, e.g. nastaliq words are not aligned with a single line, but a series of "waves" for each segment (compare kufi or thuluth and nastaliq, diwani (ok, diwani's a bit extreme)) • how can I easily shade each line of actual text? so that a line doesn't peek out of it or doesn't get cropped? How would one shade text written in nastaliq? for Latin and most supported languages, text normally doesn't exceed the line-height, so it's fairly easy to apply a mask without getting into the text composition/layout rabbit hole. If you have any tips - I'll take anything (I've tried a lot of approaches, but I'm just a sample of one, with only one thought-sponge/monkey brain to solve this)

I don’t understand the problem enough and it sounds difficult… buuut… potentially possible with tools like opentype.js that might give you access all glyphs, components, etc. — but I don’t know how well it works with non-latin scripts. I’ve used it in the past and also in my current project where I need to inspect font metrics.