[XeTeX] XeTeX and Classical Mongolian

Jonathan Kew jonathan_kew at sil.org
Fri Oct 8 11:39:41 CEST 2004


On 8 Oct 2004, at 9:35 am, Yves Codet wrote:

> Hello.
>
> Le 4 oct. 04, à 11:54, Jonathan Kew a écrit :
>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> There are a few AAT fonts in Panther (perhaps they come from that 
> optional "additional Asian fonts" package). But they don't seem to do 
> what one would expect them to do: select initial, medial and final 
> shapes according to needs.

I believe these fonts do not contain AAT tables supporting 
complex-script shaping; they're basically Chinese fonts, and include a 
few AAT features appropriate for Chinese. I notice that STFangsong, for 
example, also contains Tibetan and Arabic Unicode characters--but there 
is no shaping behavior, so it's not really useful for these scripts.

My guess is that some official Chinese standard calls for fonts/systems 
to support a certain repertoire of characters, and that's why they have 
these Unicode codepoints covered in the Chinese fonts; but all that's 
there is a single nominal glyph for each "supported" character, no 
actual script behavior.

According to Xenotype's web site (http://www.xenotypetech.com), they've 
done some work on an AAT-enabled Mongolian font, but have faced some 
challenges and don't offer a timetable for any product release. (It's 
certainly possible in principle; I did a quick-and-dirty Mongolian font 
for GX--essentially the same technology--years ago, but that was 
pre-Unicode.)

> \begin{document}
>
> \special{x:gsave}	% does this mean: remember the current position?

No, it means remember (push on a stack) the current transformation of 
the graphics state...

> \special{x:rotate -90}
>
> \man{ᠪᡞ ᡤᡡᠨᡞᠴᡞ᠈ }
>
> \special{x:grestore}

...and this pops the saved state from the stack.

>
> \end{document}
> %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
>
> All letters have their initial shape. Besides I must have 
> misunderstood something: letters themselves are rotated (I only wanted 
> the direction of writing to be rotated).

\special{x:rotate ...} is a graphics state transformation in the PDF 
generation, so it rotates everything. This would be the appropriate 
thing to do with a Mongolian font designed to be usable horizontally 
(like Code2000).

Sorry, nice try but those fonts are not actually usable!

Jonathan



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