[luatex] Indic scripts

[Mike Maxwell]

On 3/24/2018 7:15 AM, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
>> Unfortunately, we discovered at the very end of this project that LuaTeX is
>> mis-rendering Tamil text.
> 
>    It’s unfortunate that you embarked in a project that includes texts in
> Tamil and Bengali without checking whether LuaTeX was able to render it
> properly.  The LuaTeX project has always been very clear, from the
> beginning, that LuaTeX wouldn’t do any rendering at all.  This is by
> design.

My excuse is that it never occurred to me that LuaTeX would not have 
this capability...  and web search just now didn't turn up any obvious 
disclaimers along those lines, although I did run into some projects 
aimed at using HarfBuzz from LuaTeX (as mentioned in yours and Luigi's 
emails just now).  But we used XeTeX with reasonably good results on 
Bengali before XeTeX switched over to HarfBuzz, so the fact that LuaTeX 
doesn't (so far) use HarfBuzz wouldn't have struck me as too worrisome 
if I had noticed it earlier...

Anyway, I think I have a work-around that involves initially typesetting 
in LuaTeX, then using the output from LuaTeX to tell XeTeX where to 
place each line of text on the page.  A real kludge, and untested as 
yet, but it will probably work (perhaps with slightly ragged right 
margins, but for our purposes that's unimportant).
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    "My definition of an interesting universe is
    one that has the capacity to study itself."
          --Stephen Eastmond