[luatex] small script to change initial letter forms

Dirk Laurie dirk.laurie at gmail.com
Mon Jan 30 07:30:36 CET 2012


Op 29 januari 2012 20:32 schreef Pablo Rodríguez <oinos at web.de> het
volgende:

>
> there is a typographical tradition of typesetting Greek using different
> glyphs for initial and medial/final forms of beta, theta and phi.
>
> The forms are the following (initial and medial/final):
>
>        βϐ ϑθ ϕφ
>
> OpenType allows this feature to be enabled in the font, but many fonts
> which have both glyph forms lack the proper OpenType feature.
>
> I guess the substitution could be performed with a small luatex script
> that could be part of Lua(La)TeX or ConTeXt documents.
>
> I would like it to use it with small portions of text and with both the
> whole Greek Iliad and Odyssey.
>
> Could anyone explain how can I achieve this?
>
> There's something similar in `kpfonts` for 18-th century English.  There,
it is not made automatic at all: `s` is medial by default, and you need
`s=` for the final form.

But making it automatic is not easy.  Take a word like "ſatisfactory".  It
takes a final "s" in a medial position because "satis facere" is two words
in Latin.  So you will need hand editing or hyphenation-style exceptions
even if you put a something like

    text:gsub("s(%s)","s= %1")

on every `text` you pass to TeX.
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