[XeTeX] Arabic and line spacing

[Musa Furber]

On Jun 3, 2005, at 5:44 PM, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> On 3 Jun 2005, at 3:39 pm, Musa Furber wrote:
>
>> The line height between lines of Arabic text always a bit large. Is 
>> there any way to reduce this? I have tried 
>> \fontsize{point-size}{on-line-size}\selectfont, but it doesn't change 
>> anything.
>>
>> Any ideas?
>
> In plain TeX terms, you need to override \lineskiplimit so as to allow 
> the nominal height and depth of adjacent lines to overlap slightly, as 
> the ascent and descent metrics of most Arabic fonts are such that 
> otherwise you get quite generous spacing.
>
> Not being much of a LaTeX user, I don't know what the appropriate 
> LaTeX idiom would be, but I expect one of the experts here can help.

I created three LaTeX files where I make a novice's attempt to change 
the leading with Times. There is one file for pdfLaTeX, another for 
XeLaTeX loading fonts with fontspec, and another for XeLaTeX using NFSS 
(\DeclareFont...).

The pdfLaTeX and XeLaTex/NFSS versions show a slight change in leading.

The XeLaTeX/fontspec leading remains constant. Is this something that 
should be changed in Will's wonderful fontspec?

I wasn't able to produce an example where leading is small enough that 
consecutive lines start to overlap - something that will be useful to 
compensate for the x-height of Arabic without vowels.

Regards,
Musa

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