Emmanuele BassiThis is definitely not how I imagined my Thursday would start
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by the slop machine, hysterically feeding tokens to an LLM looking for an angry fix.
Alexandre Mazari@ebassi HarfBuzz? Yeah, that sucks.
retrimental@retrimental it turns text into individual elements that can be mapped to individual shapes that can then be rendered. Latin is somewhat simple (if you ignore ligature marks and things like word breaks), but it gets really complicated for other, non-western writing systems
@ebassi @scaroo
Okay I think I get the gist of it now. Seems to convert the Latin alphabet into other languages outside the Latin alphabet in a way that tries to conform to our a standard way of writing/reading.
I could be wrong but that's what I got of it. Thank you guys.
So why the hell does that need AI?
Kevin SmithSimple fonts for certain scripts like Latin can just have one glyph for each Unicode character they cover and it will work. Advanced fonts are more complex and need to map sequences of characters onto sequences of glyphs.
HarfBuzz takes the sequence of characters, the rules defined by the font standard, the rules and metadata defined in the font itself, and various other context and figures out which of the font's glyphs need to be used,