Some Persian characters don't connect together

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Can this still be reproduced in 20w30a or later?

@miwob

Hi, Yes it is still like before

I will attach a screenshot.

Can confirm in 20w51a.

Still affects all versions up to 1.17

This bug seems to be the same as the bug with the Jawi letters (MC-226357)

Code analysis (23w18a)

Yarn names are used here: 23w18a+build.1 for 23w18a. The decompiled code shown below has been generated using Fabric’s fork of CFR.

Minecraft’s text rendering is basic and fails to handle complex scripts properly. In TextRenderer (with constants manually unfolded):

public String mirror(String text) {
        try {
            Bidi bidi = new Bidi(new ArabicShaping(ArabicShaping.LETTERS_SHAPE).shape(text), Bidi.DIRECTION_DEFAULT_RIGHT_TO_LEFT);
            bidi.setReorderingMode(Bidi.REORDER_DEFAULT);
            return bidi.writeReordered(Bidi.DO_MIRRORING);
        } catch (ArabicShapingException arabicShapingException) {
            return text;
        }
    }
    
    // ...
    
    private int drawInternal(String text, float x, float y, int color, boolean shadow, Matrix4f matrix, VertexConsumerProvider vertexConsumers, TextLayerType layerType, int backgroundColor, int light, boolean mirror) {
        if (mirror) {
            text = this.mirror(text);
        }
        color = TextRenderer.tweakTransparency(color);
        Matrix4f matrix4f = new Matrix4f(matrix);
        if (shadow) {
            this.drawLayer(text, x, y, color, true, matrix, vertexConsumers, layerType, backgroundColor, light);
            matrix4f.translate(FORWARD_SHIFT);
        }
        x = this.drawLayer(text, x, y, color, false, matrix4f, vertexConsumers, layerType, backgroundColor, light);
        return (int)x + (shadow ? 1 : 0);
    }

TextRenderer#mirror uses ICU4J’s ArabicShaping to replace Arabic-script codepoints with their equivalent presentation forms. It then reorders the characters in the string to visual order. The resulting string is displayed from left to right, rendering each character individually.

Unfortunately, ArabicShaping does not reshape letters specific to languages other than Arabic, and there are many other scripts that cannot be shaped in this manner. Properly fixing this issue would require using a full-featured text shaping library and using a font format that supports shaping features.

In reply of @+merlan #flirora
"...The resulting string is displayed from left to right, rendering each character individually."
This is what to be expected in programs that do not have any support for Arabic characters. But actually the letters aren't shown individually, and the game shows the letter order and their renders correctly (except some which we'll discuss later). The only applied part could be if the sentences are mixed with English or other LtR languages, which is something totally else that is not our subject of this bug. In that case, it makes the split parts of the sentence backwards. As of now, the overall Arabic letters are still readable and is in the correct form.

Minecraft versions before 1.15 were fine. This bug has affected every single version of Minecraft after one of the snapshots. It was fixed for common Arabic letters but hasn't been fixed for some other letters (the exceptions I mentioned earlier) of languages that use the same Arabic letter writing. For this instance, Malay language is also affected as far as I'm aware.

> Minecraft versions before 1.15 were fine.

That’s not true – I’ve attached a screenshot from 1.10.2 that also shows this issue.