[webkit-dev] Stretchy Characters

[Alex Milowski]

I've been looking around to see how stretching of characters is handled in
other typesetting systems.  I stumbled across this article about how
Mozilla handles this:

   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/encoding/

They compose a single stretchy character (e.g a right curly brack { ) from
a number of glyph components.  They have a mapping table that
maps characters to glyphs in specialized fonts and then they stack
these glyphs vertically as appropriate.

Is this possible in WebKit's internals today?

The end effect for Mozilla is that they have nice stretchy characters
for Mathematics.  The consequence is that you need to have the right
fonts or it just doesn't work.

-- 
--Alex Milowski
"The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
considered."

Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics