[i18n-activity] Use of term 'character' is simplistic and potentially wrong (#1455)

aphillips has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/i18n-activity:

== Use of term 'character' is simplistic and potentially wrong ==
Section_etc_title
(https://w3c.github.io/imsc-hrm/spec/imsc-hrm.html#paint-text)

> a glyph is a tuple consisting of (i) one character and (ii) the computed values of the following style properties

Character is the wrong term here? There is also a note about character-to-glyph later that only partially addresses the problem:

> While one-to-one mapping between characters and typographical glyphs is generally the rule in some scripts, e.g. latin script, it is the exception in others. For instance, in arabic script, a character can yield multiple glyphs depending on its position in a word. The Hypothetical Render Model always assumes a one-to-one mapping, but reduces the performance of the glyph buffer for scripts where one-to-one mapping is not the general rule (see GCpy below).

The problem here is that a glyph can be formed by more than one Unicode code point (i.e. "character"), not just that a user-perceived character can have more than one glyph associated with (such as with Arabic). See for example [here](https://www.w3.org/TR/charmod-norm/#graphemeExample). 

The model appears to be trying to compute a kind of "complexity of rendering" score and might need to consider some other factors (for example, mixed directionality in text)

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Received on Monday, 31 January 2022 15:41:51 UTC