[XeTeX] fontspec manual 10.17 (scripts/languages)

David Perry hospes.primus at verizon.net
Mon Jul 19 21:10:35 CEST 2010


I've been reading 10.17 (version of July 11, 2010) and have some 
questions, and found one typo.

10.17 (the very beginning)
It would be helpful to have an example of the script and language 
selection in use.  I use the Junicode font, which contains an OT lookup 
to provide the Icelandic form of the letter thorn rather than the Old 
English form when text is tagged as Icelandic.  What is wrong with this?

	\fontspec[Language=Icelandic]{Junicode}
	Þis is the letter þorn in the Icelandic language, using Junicode

It compiles without protest, but I still get the default Old English 
shape for thorn.  (My document is already using Latin script, so I 
didn't specify that specifically.)

There may also be some interactions of script and language.  A friend 
asked me to help him get Sanskrit working in XeLaTeX. He's using the 
Devanagari script (I am told that Sanskrit is sometimes written in other 
scripts). He's on a Mac using an AAT font, so he should only need to use:

\fontspec{Devanagari MT}

right?  At first I told him to include

\fontspec[Script=Devanagari]{Devanagari MT}

but later realized that's only for OT.  The second paragraph of 10.17 
does mention this, but a footnote or parenthetical remark ("Don't do 
this with AAT fonts!") might save people like me who work almost 
exclusively with OT from making silly mistakes.

I take it he does NOT need to specify [Language=Sanskrit].  Later on, if 
he gets an OT font that has some special features for Sanskrit (if such 
a font exists--I'll call it RigVeda) and wants to use it on his Mac, 
then he would write:

\fontspec[Script=Devanagari,Language=Sanskrit]{RigVeda}

to automatically select the ICU renderer and enable the special stuff 
for Sanskrit.  Yes?

10.17.1
Typo: TRK is the tag for Turkish in OpenType; tur is the ISO tag.  (See 
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/ttoreg.htm)  A brief 
explanation beyond the phrase "OpenType definition" might be helpful too 
for those who don't know the OT tags yet (especially since they are not 
the same as the ISO tags with which people might be familiar).

The phrase "Further scripts . . . " confused me.  First I thought it 
meant the ability to add scripts or languages not already defined in 
fontspec.  But fontspec already knows all the ones that are defined in 
OpenType, so how could one add a new script if it doesn't have an OT 
tag, since the OT tag is required for the definition?  And the examples 
showed a script and a language that are already in fontspec.  Does it 
mean something different?

Thanks - David







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