[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/8/1 Ulrike Fischer <news3 at nililand.de>:
> Am Wed, 1 Aug 2012 11:58:31 +0100 schrieb Philip TAYLOR:
>
>>> Well you only confirm my impression: That quite a lot of scripts
>>> never felt the pressure put on us by the movable type printing.
>
>> Is that not good ?  Would Chinese calligraphy look anywhere near
>> as beautiful if its glyph forms had been forcibly coerced into
>> meeting the constraints imposed by movable type printing ?
>
> Sure, but people who not only want to look at glyphs and admire
> their beauty but also use them to communicate through print,
> websites, mail, twitter, sms ... musst accept that technical
> restrictions and problems musst be taken into accout too.
>
> Scripts have always been shaped by the material (you only need to
> look at Cuneiform). And when you switch the material and tool used
> to write e.g. from clay to paper or to computer this will always
> have an impact back on the script.
>
LuaTeX can be considered a flavour of TeX thus if XeTeX can load a
font and use the glyphs as they are now and compose them to form a
word, I do not understand why a change in the script is needed. LuaTeX
is not able to form a word from Devanagari glyphs. MS Office,
OpenOffice, modern web browser can do it, so why should we discard the
very basics of Indic orthography a create the new one just because
nobody has implemented the Indic scripts in lua so far? And discard
all Indic fonts and create new ones that will suit the new
orthography?

> --
> Ulrike Fischer
> http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/
>
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz