On: Why It's So Hard to Design Arabic Typefaces

[pavel_lishin]

I know nothing about font design; as far as I thought, I assumed that the computer read some given vector data from a font file, and then displayed them, with maybe a bit of logic to take care of things like kerning.

How does modern software render fonts that have letters that change drastically based on their position, like Arabic?

[akx → pavel_lishin]

In OpenType, via the GSUB table. https://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/gsub.htm

[chris_wot → pavel_lishin]

Have a read of http://behdad.org/text/ (at least for Unix based systems).