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Great to see more work in this space. Diversity of font parsing and shaping engines is important to make sure the ecosystem doesn't become reliant on bug-for-bug compatibility with the existing engines. (It's dangerously close already, due to the quirks of DirectWrite, GDI, and FreeType.)

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Yeah! This was a big reason why we've invested in funding the work on https://github.com/n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents/ - hopefully this makes the barrier to entry to building font shaping engines a little lower for newcomers, and gives us a place to document findings, separate from any single implementation.

Have any bugs been discovered and reported in the other implementations due to this work?

Not bugs per se, but a couple of improvements were fed back to HarfBuzz's Indic shaper.

The first was a minor optimisation to the final reordering of pre-base matras; the second was an adjustment to the output of the Indic table generator.

Yes, this was definitely part of the motivation for embarking on this project.

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