[XeTeX] Nastaliq [was: The future of XeTeX]

[Khaled Hosny]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2012 at 10:28:57PM -0400, Mike Maxwell wrote:
> On 8/1/2012 6:48 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> >I remember specifically testing some Nastaliq fonts and Hans fixing some
> >small issues I found, I just tested again now and IranNastaliq seems to
> >work (my fork of Nafees Nastaleeq is broken though, but it uses an
> >OpenType GDEF feature not supported by LuaTeX's font loader, so this is
> >expected and not even Arabic specific).
> 
> I'm interested in this.  We have used Nafees Nastaleeq v1.2 (IIRC),
> and plan to use it for Punjabi written in Shahmukhi.  While this
> font works reasonably well in XeTeX, there were a couple things we
> were bothered by.  But it's been awhile since we last used it, and
> we're not experts in this style of Arabic script, so I can't
> remember the problems, nor would I be confident enough to say much
> about them anyway.
> 
> Have you written up your work on Nastaliq?

My fork is hosted here:
https://github.com/khaledhosny/hussaini-nastaleeq

I started it a while ago to added missing Arabic support (Nafees
Nastaleeq didn't provide Arabic characters that there are different Urdu
code points for them), lately I started doing more general work like
fixing vowel mark positioning (not complete yet) and utilizing some
unusual OpenType aspects to serve as a benchmark for rendering engines
and fix some complex issues to possible otherwise (like dynamically
positioning the dots to avoid clash in overcrowded contexts).

Regards,
 Khaled