Nat McCully We live in a multilingual world. Yet, how does one decide how to size and position type in different scripts? There seem to be no rules governing the relative sizes and positions of glyphs in different fonts, especially when those fonts are non-Latin. Digital fonts have historically supported Latin typography best. The font origin is normally placed at the Latin baseline.
The font height is a combination of the Latin ascent and descent. These metrics are unrelated to the key typographic measurements or offsets in non-Latin languages, and yet none of those non-Latin metrics are consistently defined or applied in fonts. Not only does this make it very difficult to typeset non-Latin languages in a consistent way, but there is no rule for how to harmonize across different scripts and languages.
The problem is not only in the lack of font data, but the layout engines also lack support for non-Latin spacing rules, include only rudimentary support for justification, and the lack of investment threatens the very existence of the art of typesetting in other languages.
This talk is about how we are addressing these shortcomings so that all languages may be set in the most beautiful way possible, and that across scripts, each native set of conventions can be harmonized with the rest.