[XeTeX] Arabic ligatures

[Musa Furber]

On 6 Jul 2004, at 10:06, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> On 5 Jul 2004, at 11:49 pm, Musa Furber wrote:
>
>> In this bug, that font is not alone....
>>
>>> I'll file a bug report with Apple re Al Bayan, but obviously it'll 
>>> take some time before a fixed version appears.
>>
>> ...and perhaps Apple will take more note since other fonts share the 
>> problem...
>>
>>> Meanwhile, I suppose you could insert a zero-width non-joiner 
>>> between the alef and lam, to prevent the ligature formation; but it 
>>> will prevent getting the special ligature for "Allah". And you don't 
>>> really want to clutter your text like that. Better to use a 
>>> different font. Does Baghdad look any better than Geeza to you? Or 
>>> how about DecoType Naskh, if you have it; I'm not sure which systems 
>>> that shipped with.
>>
>> ...like Badghdad and DecoType Naskh.
>
> I'm not seeing the same behavior with those fonts....
>
>> Too bad, too, since the Baghdad and Naskh fonts looks better. Or 
>> should I say "font"? I have them both and they look identical.
>
> ... nor do they look identical.
>
> What versions of these fonts do you have? FontBook can show you the 
> versions, as well as where the fonts are installed, if you hover over 
> them in the list. I wonder if perhaps you have older versions; though 
> even that doesn't explain why they'd look identical. Something isn't 
> right there.

Today the fonts look different. Must have been fatigue induced operator 
incompetence. They do look different, and the strange ligature appear 
in Al Bayan, not the others.

I tried DecoType Naskh on a 20 page Arabic text that is fully vowelled. 
One thing that struck me is that the vowel placement was distracting.

Regards,
Musa