Hacker News Reader

(author) The problem is that the opentype "language" doesn't have loops or anything resembling regular expressions, where I could just tell it to sub everything between two characters. So, I could highlight text between quotes, but only up to a certain arbitary limit, so I chose not to implement that at all.

Or did I misunderstand your comment? Care to elaborate on your idea?

View on HN

I'm not the person you're replying to, but it looks like it's possible to carry around a finite state machine, hence get the power of regular expressions (with caveats). I made an example that should highlight quoted text: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41254638

It doesn't check that there's a closing quote, but it should work for highlighting syntactically valid code (once you fix my mistakes). I don't see a way for a character to affect others arbitrarily far back unless some fancier features like ignoring certain classes can be abused.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/g...

A reverse chain might work?

Nice find, I think it would.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com