I've been doing text rendering professionally for a few years now and I wouldn't consider myself fluent in anything other than English and maybe German (I'm a bit rusty in the latter). I can also speak some Japanese, but, other than that, that's it. The rest of my knowledge is a smattering of weird details about various languages that are useful for writing text renderers but terribly unhelpful for actually understanding the languages.
Yeah there's a reason all my examples use the same ~3 languages, and only a few random fragments from them. You just need a few examples that demonstrate that something can happen. Everything actually works pretty uniformly, so as long as you have a few examples that cover the interesting cases and handle those cases in a general way, everything tends to work fine. The actual font formats are much more nasty and corner-casey. (Thank god you don't need to deal with that, eh Patrick?)
Same reason I prefer to use imperfect terms that capture the important aspects of the problem-space from an english-speaking perspective. Are ligatures the right word for how arabic and marathi get shaped into glyphs? Maybe not, but as long as you get that the æ ligature can be synthesized from ae by a font, and that this is super important for some languages, you're on the right path.
I don't even know what the fragments I use mean, lol. I like to assume I'm just copy-pasting Arabic swears around. Apparently at least one is just Manish's name?
Yes, I noticed that. :) Both मनीष and منش are "Manish", though he didn't bother with the vowels in the Arabic-script version, so alternative readings are possible.
