A smart component trick for adjusting spacing in Devanagari conjuncts while keeping automatic alignment intact in Glyphs

https://muthunedumaran.com/2025/12/30/a-spacer-trick-for-conjunct-spacing-in-glyphs/

Unicode 17 includes a change that may improve line breaking, backspacing, and other behavior for Khmer, Myanmar, and twelve other Brahmic scripts: Extended grapheme cluster breaks, which may be used in such processes to identify “characters”, no longer occur within sequences of a conjoiner and a consonant in these scripts. Such sequences represent conjunct forms that users see as indivisible entities.

See

https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44/tr44-36.html#Derivation_InCB

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2024/24058r-conjuncts.pdf

I18N GAP FIXED: Line-breaking now works for Javanese & other SE Asian scripts in all major browser engines.

Javanese, Balinese, and some other scripts can't wrap at word boundaries because those often lie in letter stacks which must be kept together. They therefore wrap at orthographic syllable boundaries. Thanks to Norbert Lindenberg, Unicode now supports this type of line-breaking.

Gap report: https://www.w3.org/TR/java-gap/#issue40_line_breaking

Article about line breaking: https://www.w3.org/International/articles/typography/linebreak.en.html#sec_se_asia2

After Safari and Chromium-based browsers, now Firefox finally also provides correct line breaking at orthographic syllable boundaries for several Brahmic scripts such as Balinese and Javanese. This style of line breaking was originally proposed in
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2022/22080r2-line-break-ortho-bnd.pdf
and standardized in Unicode 15.1
https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/tr14-51.html

The screen shots show line breaking for Balinese in the past and the present. The text is supposed to stay inside the box.

New article:

Order and disorder in Unicode

The Unicode Standard lacks well-defined encoding orders for the orthographic syllables of Brahmic scripts. This creates problems such as missing search results, incorrectly rendered text, and security holes. This article discusses the causes of these problems and various localized attempts at solving them. It proposes a new form of normalization as a more generic solution.

https://lontar.eu/en/notes/order-and-disorder-in-unicode/

New article: Introduction to Brahmic scripts

…covering their usage for major languages, their characteristics as an abugida, the formation of orthographic syllables, and layout issues.

https://lontar.eu/en/notes/introduction-to-brahmic-scripts/

Updated article: Encoding orders of Brahmic scripts

Documents the encoding orders that the OpenType Universal Shaping Engine assumes for the Brahmic scripts it supports. Understanding encoding orders is necessary when rendering or otherwise interpreting text in these scripts, as well es when entering text using input methods or otherwise generating text.

Updated for Unicode 16.0 and latest USE documentation and data.

https://lontar.eu/en/notes/encoding-orders-of-brahmic-scripts/