[XeTeX] Arabic and line spacing

[Stephen Moye]

 On Friday, June 03, 2005, at 11:40PM, Musa Furber <musaf at runbox.com> wrote:

>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

I looked at your samples and what you did not do is follow JK's advice about \lineskiplimit.

Somewhere in the preamble of your document you must type something like \lineskiplimit=-20pt (or whatever negative figure works for you).

This works -- I tried it in your samples.

HTH

Stephen Moye