[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Wed Aug 1 19:07:21 CEST 2012


2012/8/1 Keith J. Schultz <keithjschultz at web.de>:
> Hi Zdenek,
>
> Do you know what a script is? XeTeX uses scripts! The the choice of a glyph
> is governed by a script.! Depending of the Font this is embedded into the Font
> itself or at least should be. Polyglossia offers another way of scripting.
>
> That it why I emphasize the port of Polyglossia to LuaTeX.
> Then Devagari would work for LuaTeX.
>
No!!! Please, before writing this nonsense, read carefully the chapter
on Indic scripts in the Unicode standard and the specification of
Indic OpenType by Microsoft, then read again Polyglossia manual.
Polyglossia has nothing to do with scripts, it deals with languages.
As far as scripts are concerned Polyglossia onbly ensures that the
font selected for a language supports the correct script. Polyglossia
is a replacement for babel. If I type \chapter, it will print Chapter
in English, Kapitola in Czech, अध्याय in Hindi. Devanagari works in
XeTeX even without Polyglossia and will work in luatex if a proper
module for luaotfload is implemented.

> The Developers of LuaTeX have stated openly that the personnally have no
> need for scripting and thereby given a very low-priority.
>
Pragma ADE does not need Indic scripts for their work (personal
message from Hans Hagen approx. a month ago).

> regards
>         Keith.
>
> Am 01.08.2012 um 15:54 schrieb Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>:
> [snip, snip]
>> 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?
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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