[XeTeX] Auto Font and Language Package in XeTeX (Khaled Hosny)

Venkatesan. S.K. (TNQ) skvenkat at tnq.co.in
Wed Dec 22 03:04:00 CET 2010


On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 05:15:13PM +0530, Venkatesan. S.K. (TNQ) wrote:
> > I suppose these are early days for unicode, especially for Indic, Hebrew
> and
> > Arabic.
>
> I'm not sure if I understand what you mean by "early" here, but Arabic
> have been part of Unicode since 1.1 (cr. 1993), bidi algorithm even
> predates Unicode.
>
> Regards,
>  Khaled
>
> --
>  Khaled Hosny
>  Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
>  Free font developer
>

When Arabic and English and Tamil are mixed in UTF-8 I can demonstrate
interesting behaviors in gedit and other text editors. Many other text
editors just render them in byte order, like byte editors, which is fine...
It may not be early days for the Unicode specs, but the implementing
applications have been having finding it difficulty, not to mention that
there have been new characters and changes being constantly made in every
Unicode version, 5.1, 6.0, etc...The OS releases lag behind and where are
the bloody fonts that has implemented Unicode 6.0? It is a nightmare for
implementors and users.
Do unicode committee have a proof of concept application (like Amaya browser
for W3  HTML) or a font?
It is possible create a font using all their PDFs but license will be
problem, I suppose...
Each and every OS and editors show different levels of compliance...

Apart from all this, there are the users who are used to WYSIWYG paradigm
and get very confused when there are different outputs in XML editors and
the PDF output.
We have had interesting problems where book authors used Arabic/Hebrew in an
insensitive version of MS Word that doesn't switch right to left and they
want the output that way and when we open it an recent version of MS Word or
the other way around, we get very interesting emails and discussions. I
generally tell them please send me a PDF and tell me what is exactly you
want in the output, we will take care of the XML. Of course, if you use a
non-Middle-East version of InDesign then right to left will not work; I
suppose InDesign folks think that Arabic should not be used non-Middle-East
folks...

Suki
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