[XeTeX] xetex and the unicode bidirectional algorithm.

[Zdenek Wagner]

2013/12/5 Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org>:
> On Wed, Dec 04, 2013 at 12:31:58AM -0500, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 5:33 PM, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> wrote:
>> > On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 01:42:21PM -0500, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>> >> Does XeLaTeX implement the Unicode BiDi algorithm?
>> >
>> > Short answer: no.
>> >
>> > I think sample documents (minimal working example) are needed for any
>> > useful suggestion.
>>
>>
>> Attached are the first 23 references from
>> https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A5%D8%B3%D8%B7%D9%86%D8%A8%D9%88%D9%84#.D9.85.D8.B5.D8.A7.D8.AF.D8.B1
>> (the Arabic wikipedia article on Istanbul), as generated by my XeLaTeX
>> formatter.
>>
>> Things to notice:
>> 1) Unicode BiDi algorithm at work in web version in places like
>> citation [1], "Statistics of the 2010 Turkey census".  XeLaTeX renders
>> this backwards.
>
> You need to explicitly markup LTR and RTL text, e.g. using polyglossia
> or bidi. You need this to enable hyphenation as well, citations 12 and
> 13 have very bad spacing because no hyphenation was enabled, for
> example. I guess the tool that generates the TeX file will have to do
> that.
>
>> 2) Broken italic for arabic in GNU freefont in citation [2].
>> (straightforward to fix)
>
> Please, please, please, never ever use GNU free font for Arabic; it is
> the most hideous, crappy and useless un-Arabic font ever created, my
> blood boils every time I see it in use.
>
Could you summarize what is wrong and report it? Steve White will
certainly fix it (unless it is better toreplace the whole Arabic
block). I see problems with dochachmee he, Urdu words as بھآرت and
ؔٹھیک are not displayed properly. I plan to report it and scan samples
from the Urdu-Hindi dictionary. (Two years ago Devanagari in FreeFont
was terrible but with my reports and testing Steve created beautiful
fonts.)

>> 3) Arabic comma instead of English comma in citation [23]. (in both
>> web and XeLaTeX output)
>
> Bad input, the input has an Arabic comma, no tricks are done here.
>
> Regards,
> Khaled
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz