[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[David Perry]

On 9/25/2010 8:43 PM, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
> >
> Exuse us but I think this is too short and does not help anyone.
>
Yes, there is certainly more to be said, but I think that Axel's work 
would be a useful addition to lshort if Peter's suggestions are added 
and a bit more about polyglossia (see below).  lshort is meant to be, 
well, short.  Having even this much will give those unacquainted with 
xe(la)tex some idea of what it's all about, and the reference to the 
wiki will (I hope) be a good source of additional information.

Here are a couple of suggestions and some typos to fix:

"The main feature is the extended character set; [colon not comma] a 
font may contain Latin, Greek and Cyrillic [note caps] characters and 
the corresponding ligatures."  You do allude to the various OpenType 
features that are available with Xe(La)TeX, but I think another sentence 
or two would be helpful.  TeX has long supported some typographic 
refinements, such as true small caps, and many people use TeX because 
they care about high-quality typography.  Directing their attention to 
other OT features such as different types of numerals, forms for all 
caps typesetting, etc. would help them understand the true benefits of 
OT, aside from its linguistic support.

Yes, there are fonts that use the localization feature to support 
language-specific forms.  One is Junicode, whose default shapes for 
Thorn/thorn are the Old English style, but which will use the modern 
Icelandic forms when text is tagged in that language.

"Some editors, _mainly on Linux,_ support digraphs, two letters that are 
combined into one [not on] character."  The compose function is hardly 
ever used on OS X or Windows; the only instance of which I am aware is 
the OpenOffice extension that provides this facility.

4.8.2: I suggest a brief mention of polyglossia and a cross-reference to 
the other section where you discuss it in more detail.

Under "It's all Greek to me," capitalize Unicode, Latin, Greek, Russian 
and Hebrew.  "advantage of using" should be "advantage to using."  Also, 
if you are going to explain \newfontfamily with polyglossia, I think you 
need to explain polyglossia's language-switching commands also, even if 
briefly.


David