[XeTeX] Letterly fonts

[mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Wed, 31 Jul 2013, Kai Hendry wrote:
> For example the above links has Hangul in the body which surprisingly
> isn't rendered by DejaVu font which should have a very wide range of
> Unicode glyphs. I do have ttf-dejavu, ttf-dejavu-core &
> ttf-dejavu-extra installed.

Be aware that supporting a language with a complex script involves more
than just having a font that covers the right code points.  In particular,
the Unified Han character range is shared by Simplified Chinese,
Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and historically Vietnamese.  The
same character codes should look different depending on which one of those
you're writing.  (See, for instance, slide 11 of this presentation:
   http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/temporary/2012-kanji-slides.pdf )
Usually a font will correctly support at most one Han-script language, and
an out-of-band mechanism (in XeLaTeX, it'd be a fontspec option) is needed
to choose between them even for the minority of fonts that support more
than one.  And Han isn't even a "complex script" in the specific technical
sense of that term used by systems like OpenType.  You're going to face
some interesting challenges if you want this to work with Thai, Tamil, or
Arabic, just to name a few.

-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/