Glyph Layout with Vowels and Cantillation

TODO XXX’s algorithm.

Gorkin’s algorithm.

There is a book on fonts: Fonts & Encodings by Yannis Haralambous. [Hara]. Despite the raving review, I was underwhelmed by it. I wanted to find out if it is possible to encode the vowel/cantillation placement logic into an OpenType font - and did not find the answer in the book.

Which is not really surprising, since the book’s author is also the author of Omega project (Unicode in TeX), about which a very informative text about printing Unicode in 2002 says:

However, Omega is very much a failure. Its creators have been guided by Principles. They were conscious of the Desirability of Flexibility. They Knew about the Demands of Fine Typesetting of Complex Scripts. …​ You cannot run to the manual, because the manual is a very interesting piece of academic prose about the difficulty of the task, but useless for a mere user.

I did find out about a useful tool for OpenType font jobs: TTX [TTX].

Does kerning work through vowels?