[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Wed Aug 1 13:22:45 CEST 2012


2012/8/1 Ulrike Fischer <news3 at nililand.de>:
> Am Wed, 1 Aug 2012 12:30:52 +0200 schrieb Zdenek Wagner:
>
>>> (As an aside I think that one should not only put pressure on
>>> xetex/luatex/open type engines to support all sorts of open type
>>> features and scripts but also on some scripts to adapt a bit to the
>>> computer age.)
>
>> Do you mean it?
>
> Yes.
>
>> Will people in India be forced to learn one
>> orthography in order to read the texts found everywhere in the
>> streets, in books, supported by MS Office, OpenOffice, LibreOffice,
>> all modern web browsers and another orthography for luatex? And how
>> about typesetting ancient text? Do you suggest to use the same
>> approach as the Indian newspapers Musulman? The editors were not
>> satisfied with the typographical quality of the Urdu text therefore
>> the newspapers are handwritten.
>
> Well you only confirm my impression: That quite a lot of scripts
> never felt the pressure put on us by the movable type printing.
> Western glyphs used in prints were greatly influenced by the
> technical possibilities and were adapted to what was possible. For
> me the idea that a printed document should look like "handwritten"
> is curious.
>
I do not state that it should look as handwritten but at least the
glyohs should have correct order and shape that is not too much
different (even in handwriting Devanagari has variants). With the
current version of luatex the correct order of glyphs cannot be
acheved. If I copy&past a text from Hindi Wikipedia and typeset it in
XeTeX, the result will be OK. If I do the same in luatex, the result
will be garbage.
> --
> Ulrike Fischer
> http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/
>
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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