[XeTeX] XeTeX vertical text layout support (for Linux & win32 users)

[Jjgod Jiang]

Hi,

2006/6/17, Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org>:
>
> I've looked over your description briefly, and it's a promising
> start, but as far as I understand it, there will be more work needed
> before it's ready to use, and provides equivalent functionality to
> the "vertical" attribute used with ATSUI fonts on OS X (which would
> be my goal).
>
> It seems to me that your suggested changes so far will allow the
> "vertical" attribute to be specified for OT fonts, and pass this to
> xdvipdfmx via the font_def flags; but in addition, the actual layout
> process in xetex needs to be aware of the vertical flag, and use the
> vertical rather than horizontal glyph metrics.

Definitely, the solution needs more careful consideration, since I don't
have access to Mac, it's really hard for me to guess how ATSUI does.
And I'm not fully understand the details in XeTeX's code. I'll be happy
to try if you can point out where/how to change the code..


>
> In addition, I'm guessing that xdvipdfmx will have problems if you
> use the same font in both vertical and horizontal modes, because
> you're storing the layout direction in the fontmap (in the form of
> the encoding name), but the fontmap entries are keyed just on the
> font name -- so the same entry will be used regardless of the writing
> direction.

Indeed. That's a problem. I'll try to fix it later.

>
> If I have a little time, I'll experiment with some of this, and see
> how it fits together in practice. Thanks for getting it started!

Again, if you have any new ideas or any testing work to be done, please
let me know :)

J.