Unicode Demystified

Line Layout

Once you've decided which words will go together on a line, the next step is to determine the order in which the characters will be arranged on that line. For the majority of scripts, this task is straightforward: The characters march in succession, one by one, from the left-hand side to the right-hand side (or, in some languages, from the top of the page to the bottom). In a couple of situations, matters get more interesting:

• The most common exception involves combining character sequences. Usually, a combining character sequence turns into a single glyph, but sometimes (especially when the text contains a lot of base–diacritic combinations) the rendering process has to draw two (or more) separate glyphs and figure out how to position ...