[XeTeX] Problem with Arabic fonts

[Jonathan Kew]

On 3 Jun 2008, at 10:37 am, L J Davies wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> I have a problem with using the Adobe Arabic Regular font with  
> XeTeX or XeLaTeX. I have been able to use fonts such as Arabic  
> Typesetting and Scheherazade without any difficulty. However, when  
> I try to use Adobe Arabic I get separate, oversized, and  
> overlapping characters. I have tried specifying the ligature  
> settings explicitly with the RawFeature setting provided by the  
> fontspec package but to no avail.
>
>
> The preamble to my document contains the following:
>
> \usepackage{euler}
>
> \usepackage{fontspec}
>
> \defaultfontfeatures{Scale=MatchLowercase,Mapping=tex-text}
>
> \usepackage{xunicode}
>
> \usepackage{xltxtra}
>
> \TeXXeTstate=1
>
> \newfontfamily\ara[Script=Arabic,Language=Arabic]{Adobe Arabic}
>
> The Arabic text itself is set between the e-TeX \beginR and \endR  
> primitives:
>
>
> \beginR{\ara (some Arabic text) }\endR
>
>
> I have tried using the font with the above settings, without the  
> language setting, and without both the script and language  
> settings. Where am I going wrong here?
>
>

I'm familiar with this problem. It occurs because Adobe Arabic is a  
CFF font but does not use a 1000-unit emsquare to define the glyph  
outlines, it uses 2048 units. When it is embedded in the PDF, the  
(correct) /FontMatrix entry gets ignored and the result is that the  
glyphs are scaled incorrectly.

I believe this is really a bug in the PDF viewers involved. It  
happens with both Apple's PDFkit and Adobe Reader 8. I have reported  
it to both, but it might help if other people complain as well!

Note that if you view the same PDF files with an earlier version of  
Adobe Reader (e.g., Acrobat Reader 5 or Adobe Reader 7), or with a  
viewer such as Evince on Linux, the glyphs look fine; these programs  
interpret the embedded font correctly and respect its /FontMatrix entry.

JK

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