[XeTeX] XeTeX and Classical Mongolian
Jonathan Kew
jonathan_kew at sil.org
Mon Oct 4 11:54:09 CEST 2004
On 3 Oct 2004, at 11:57 pm, Thomas T. Pedersen wrote:
> Has anyone tried to use XeTeX with Classical Mongolian?
You're probably the first!
> Code2000 vers. 1.14 has OpenType support for Classical Mongolian and
> works with BabelPad under Windows XP with Uniscribe 1.471.4063.0.
>
> In XeTeX, i
> f I just define the font as "Code2000:script=mong", the output
> displays the isolated form of the characters.
>
> I've experienced with three available features 'init', 'medi' and
> 'fina', adding e.g. ";+init;+medi;+fina". The output changes but it's
> apparently using either the initial, medial or final forms of the
> characters - and not the right combination of them.
>
> Attached you'll find a short sample text string in Classical Mongolian
> to experiment with.
>
> Any suggestions to make it work are welcome.
I'm afraid it just won't work, for now. There's no Mongolian script
shaping engine in XeTeX at this point (so "script=mong" is ignored).
And the default engine used for Latin, etc., won't work because it
applies the features you specify to *all* the glyphs. But for Mongolian
you need the engine to understand the script and apply *different*
features to each glyph depending on its context.
XeTeX is using the ICU layout library
<http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/> for OpenType support, so you could
file a bug report/feature request regarding Mongolian support there,
and it may eventually become available.
Sorry to disappoint you. If there's an AAT-enabled Mongolian font
available, that would work, as the AAT model puts all the behavior into
the font tables, requiring no script-specific support in the
application.
(Any volunteers to write the OT shaping code? ICU is open-source.....)
Jonathan
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