Bug 236477

Summary: letter-spacing is totally broken in Burmese and Thai and Lao
Product: WebKit Reporter: Myles C. Maxfield <mmaxfield>
Component: TextAssignee: Nobody <webkit-unassigned>
Status: NEW ---    
Severity: Normal CC: mmaxfield, webkit-bug-importer
Priority: P2 Keywords: InRadar
Version: WebKit Nightly Build   
Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
Bug Depends on: 236489    
Bug Blocks:    
Attachments:
Description Flags
Test case
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Test case none

Description Myles C. Maxfield 2022-02-10 17:29:24 PST
Created attachment 451625 [details]
Test case

WebKit destroys the shapes of the letters. Compare to Chrome / Firefox.
Comment 1 Myles C. Maxfield 2022-02-10 17:31:26 PST
Created attachment 451626 [details]
Test case
Comment 2 Myles C. Maxfield 2022-02-10 17:34:52 PST
Oh, wow, ComplexTextController applies letter-spacing to _every glyph_. That's totally bogus.
Comment 3 Myles C. Maxfield 2022-02-10 23:29:20 PST
It looks like the correct iterator to use is kCFStringCursorMovementCluster.

This is turning out to be harder than I thought it would be. Because Burmese text is so complicated, it looks like I can't:

- add space to the right side of a glyph if the character just after the character the glyph corresponds to is a boundary, because of the string "ဂြို". This string has 4 code points, but no glyph corresponds to the last code point - the last glyph corresponds to the second-to-last and last code points together.
- add space to the left side of a glyph if the character the glyph corresponds to is a boundary, because of the same string "ဂြို". Here, the leftmost character corresponds to string index 1 and then the next glyph corresponds to string index 0. Therefore, if we did this, we'd inject letter-spacing in the middle of the cluster.

I think the solution is to keep track of cluster boundaries as we iterate across glyphs, and insert space to the right of a glyph if the current glyph and the next glyph belong to different clusters.
Comment 4 Myles C. Maxfield 2022-02-10 23:43:11 PST
https://twitter.com/OhBendy/status/1492033041988001837 indicates that this is a problem for Thai and Lao too.
Comment 5 Radar WebKit Bug Importer 2022-02-17 17:30:31 PST
<rdar://problem/89118337>