Hacker News Reader

Comment by penteract | Hacker News Reader

I think the author has underestimated the power of the substitution rules - it looks like it should be possible to drag a state machine along, hence recognise any regular language. Something like the following should handle quoted strings (untested and needs every character to be listed out in the definitions of @Char, @CharQuoted and @NonQuoteQuoted):

    sub Quote @Char' by @CharQuoted;
    sub Backslash.quoted Backslash' by Backslash.quoted2;
    sub Backslash.quoted Quote' by Quote.escaped;
    sub [@NonQuoteQuoted Quote.escaped Backslash.quoted2] @Char' by @CharQuoted;

I don't know if context can be carried between different lines.

View on HN

How long until it runs Doom?

You may have already seen it (here on hn) but someone absolutely has made a game within a font: https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html

That's genius, thank you!! I will have to try that tomorrow but I have a feeling it might just work : - )

Here's a tested version that, given text containing only lower case letters, backslash and double quote, capitalizes the letters between quotes and handles escaping reasonably. (works with NotoSans-Regular.ttf)

    @Char = [a-z quotedbl backslash];
    @CharQuoted = [A-Z quotesingle slash];
    @NonQuoteQuoted = [A-Z slash];
    @Escaped = [asterisk dollar];
    
    feature liga {
      lookup xa {
        sub quotedbl @Char' by @CharQuoted;
        sub slash backslash' by dollar; 
        sub slash quotedbl' by asterisk;
        sub [@NonQuoteQuoted asterisk dollar] @Char' by @CharQuoted;
      } xa;
    } liga;
    feature liga {
      lookup xb {
        sub quotesingle' by quotedbl;
        sub slash' by backslash;
        sub dollar' by  backslash;
        sub asterisk' by quotedbl;
      } xb;
    } liga;

Do you know if there is a programmatic way to convert multi character to multi character without intermediate glyphs? E.G. snake -> snāk

For that example, I think you could do

    s n a' k e -> ā
    s n ā k e' -> NULL

although that would also change "snāke" to "snāk", which is not quite what you asked for.

I don't think there's a way to do many-to-many substitution in general, although it would always be possible if you create intermediate glyphs. I believe Section 5 of http://adobe-type-tools.github.io/afdko/OpenTypeFeatureFileS... gives the full list of substitution types.

Imagine cross-compiling a 60MB tree-sitter grammar into your OpenFont file’s metadata!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com