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We're actively working on making Prince better! If you are in the Melbourne/Australia area and are interested in working in

@MercuryLang

@RustLang

, let us know! There's lots of super interesting computer science and programming language problems involved printing/page layout.

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Dave Cramer

@dauwhe

· Jan 10, 2019

Replying to @ndw

I have nothing but good things to say about PrinceXML. We've produced more than fifty million print books with it. It's becoming more and more sophisticated, especially with Prince for Books. It's easy to experiment with. And there's great support from @yeslogic. CSS + Print =

Florian

@frivoal

Jan 11, 2019

Didn't know you had started using Rust. Very interesting.

Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

Jan 11, 2019

Yeah! I've been using it for some time on a research project, and we've also been working on replacing our font shaping code (currently in C) with Rust. Still a relatively long road towards something we can open source, but that's our eventual goal!

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Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

Aug 14, 2019

Yeah! We'd love to have collaborators! At the moment the code is currently living in Prince itself. Our main focus at the moment is getting indic shaping working for a release, but hopefully then we can work on pulling it out into a separate repo/crate that we can get help with!

Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

Aug 14, 2019

By 'getting indic shaping working' we mean that we've got most of it done, but we are trying to do a bunch of testing to ensure we haven't messed stuff up! We've been implementing it based on the MS docs and github.com/n8willis/opent, and report back any inconsistencies we see 🙂

github.com

GitHub - n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents: Documentation of OpenType shaping behavior

Documentation of OpenType shaping behavior. Contribute to n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents development by creating an account on GitHub.

Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

Aug 14, 2019

We're also extremely grateful for Harfbuzz - it's been a great help towards understanding the domain of shaping, being the only real open source implementation out there. Much respect to you and the other contributors!

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Replying to

Heh, font parsing has been interesting! 😂 I'm currently at work on a binary data description language that can handle it! At the moment we do it at a lower level in Rust though (in a way that is inspired by our data description language).

11:23 PM · Aug 14, 2019Twitter Web App

Replying to

I guess the balance we've had to strike is that we kind of want to improve the documentation and standards around font shaping as we go, so we've been trying to not go for a direct port, and instead reconsider every decision as we go and document those findings.

Behdad Esfahbod

@behdadesfahbod

Aug 15, 2019

That's great. Given that I keep hearing that this will be Open Sourced, I wish it was done in the open to begin with, so we could participate in redesign / had chance to communicate our design.

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