[XeTeX] Warning about no Hindi language in Devanagari script

[Steve White]

Hi,

Thanks for the replies!

It looks to me as if we have a small bug in fontspec (or some library it calls).

To clarify: I'm presently working on the FreeSerif font.  It has for a
long time had (poor) support for Devanagari; very recently, it is
better (in SVN!).

The message doesn't make sense to me.  Both Sanskrit and Hindi use the
Devanagari script.  All of the Unicode range for Devanagari is now
supported by the font.  There are many OpenType tables relating to
Devanagari.

What exactly is fontspec looking for?

There is one table concerning Sanskrit.  As Hindi is
transformation-wise simpler than Sanskrit, it uses only the "default"
tables.  So there are no tables that specifically refer to Hindi.

But that is nothing peculiar to FreeSerif.  Many fonts meant for Hindi
contain only OpenType tables tagged for Devanagari (and among those,
most also

So, I tried adding a dummy table and subtable, marked deva{HIN }.
And the warning goes away.
It would seem that it complains when trying to render Hindi, if the
font doesn't have tables specifically labelled "deva{HIN }".

What is the point of this warning?  Is it to inform the user that the
font can't have good support for a language, due to having no lookup
tables for it?  That might be useful information.  In the case of
these languages, it is indeed very poor to fail to perform certain
complex transformations.

However the current logic is wrong.  For a font meant to display
Hindi, it should be enough to have tables tagged for the Devanagari
script.

Cheers!

On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 11:50 AM, Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa at web.de> wrote:
>
> Am 20.1.2012 um 23:05 schrieb Steve White:
>
>> "Package fontspec Warning:
>>    Font "Free Serif/ICU/ICU" does not contain language 'Hindi' for
>> script 'Devanagari'
>
> Trying your example with both GNU FreeSerif and with Code2000 with my XeTeX version, 3.1415926-2.3-0.9997.5 (TeX Live 2011), it gives with fontspec.sty 2011/09/18 v2.2a and fontspec-patches.sty 2011/09/18 v2.2a and fontspec-xetex.sty 2011/09/18 v2.2a such warnings:
>
>        *************************************************
>        * fontspec warning: "language-not-exist"
>        *
>        * Language 'Sanskrit' not available for font 'Code2000' with script
>        * 'Devanagari'.
>        * 'Default' language used instead.
>        *************************************************
>        *************************************************
>        * fontspec warning: "language-not-exist"
>        *
>        * Language 'Hindi' not available for font 'Code2000' with script 'Devanagari'.
>        * 'Default' language used instead.
>        *************************************************
>
> This can be interpreted as if there are no language specific differences in font shaping when using the Devanagari script. Or they are not built-in to these fonts... In the latter case maybe some "native" Indian font offers the desired script and language support.
>
> --
> Greetings
>
>  Pete
>
> To most people solutions mean finding the answers. But to chemists solutions
> are things that are still all mixed up.
>