Didn't know you had started using Rust. Very interesting.
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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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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!
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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 🙂
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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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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).
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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.
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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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Yeah, I’ve definitely been pushing for this, really sorry about the situation this puts you in! We also didn’t want to be one of those annoying ‘rewrite it in rust!’ people 😅