[XeTeX] Problems with some "exotic" RTL scripts

[François Charette]

Hello,

While working on a revision of the documentation of my bidi package, I 
have tested all right-to-left scripts available in Unicode 5.0. Apart 
from Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac, these are: Thâna, N'Ko, Old Italic 
(Etruscan), Phoenician, Cypriot and Kharosthi.

I have tested N'Ko with Code2000, and it turns out that contextual 
substitutions are not performed, even though they seem to be properly 
implemented in the font. This occurs with XeTeX+ICU but also with the 
latest version of Pango on my Linux box. Does anyone on this list have 
any experience with the N'Ko script?

The other problem concerns Old Italic (Etruscan): even though the script 
is declared in the fonts Code2000 and MPH B2 Damase, it is not processed 
as right-to-left scripts as it should (I have to type \char"202E in 
front of each word to have them displayed correctly). Any idea?

Thanks,
François