[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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