<div>Thanks Jonathan and others for all useful comments.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>It is indeed a font issue. If I enable GIST-KNOTHema font (not elegant though!), hyphen character is displayed. But, even this has issues with other characters like avargraha, "" etc.</div><div><br></div><div>
I could not get your point about U + 2010. How do I verify what is supported by font?</div><div>Any reference to know how to build my own font, say by integrating fonts available.</div><div><br></div><div>I also tried BARAHA unicode fonts, but it does not seem to work at all. I get junk characters. </div>
<div><br></div><div>Thanks,</div><div>Sreenivasa</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 4:20 PM, Jonathan Kew <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jfkthame@googlemail.com" target="_blank">jfkthame@googlemail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="padding-left:1ex;margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:#ccc 1px solid">
<div>On 18 Apr 2009, at 07:17, Sreenivasa Guttal wrote:<br><br>> On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 12:08 AM, Jonathan Kew <<a href="mailto:jfkthame@googlemail.com" target="_blank">jfkthame@googlemail.com</a><br>> > wrote:<br>
><br>> On 17 Apr 2009, at 18:49, Sreenivasa Guttal wrote:<br>><br>> > If I make defaultlangauge is non-english(kannada or sanskrit) and<br>> > \setmainfont, the other issues go away.<br>> > However, I the hyphen character is still not seen. That is the main<br>
> > isssue now.<br>><br>> Have you checked whether it is actually present in the font you're<br>> using? Have you looked for error/warning messages in the log?<br>><br>><br>> YES. The given font does not seem to support hyphen character.<br>
> That is why I tried to redefine defaulthyphenchar, by including it<br>> in english language. (with begin and end english). Somehow, this is<br>> not working.<br><br></div>Of course not. As I wrote before (and as The TeXbook says),<br>
\defaulthyphenchar is an integer parameter of TeX. You can't magically<br>assign some arbitrary token list to this.<br><br>If the font has some other character that you want to use for<br>hyphenation, you can set its \hyphenchar to the (ASCII or Unicode)<br>
value, and this will be used when TeX hyphenates. (BTW, no need to<br>mess with \defaulthyphenchar for this, just use the HyphenChar feature<br>of fontspec when you define the font.)<br>
<div><br>><br>> In summary, How do I get this hyphen character displayed when I<br>> given font does not support it? This should solve my main problem.<br><br></div>If the font has a suitable character somewhere (e.g., U+2010), use the<br>
HyphenChar feature to specify it.<br><br>If the font has no suitable character at all, then you can't get<br>automatic hyphenation to work with this font, as TeX does not have the<br>ability to insert arbitrary commands such as font changes as part of<br>
automatic hyphenation. You could use explicit \discretionary commands<br>that do a font switch, but auto-hyphenation based on patterns won't do<br>that.<br>
<div><br>><br>> > Another observation. I also see that other special charactrers like<br>> > `avagraha', `virama'(danda) are not displayed properly.<br>><br>> Again, have you checked that the font you're using supports the<br>
> characters involved?<br>><br>> If I use these character by swithcing to a different language which<br>> has support for these fonts, it does work.<br>> Neverthless, I do not know why such basic characters are not<br>
> supported by these fonts.<br><br></div>That's a question for the font developers. I guess they didn't think<br>people would need them in Kannada. If they're wrong, you'll have to<br>convince them to improve their fonts (or fix them yourself), or choose<br>
different fonts that properly support the character set you need.<br><br>I took a quick look at the Mallige and Kedage fonts available through<br>Sourceforge; is that what you're using? They seem to have a number of<br>
problems: the glyph outlines in Mallige are extremely poorly drawn,<br>and both fonts show some deviations from Unicode compliance. It looks<br>like they encode a "danda" as U+003E ">", for example!<br>
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<div><br>JK<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>XeTeX mailing list<br><a href="mailto:postmaster@tug.org" target="_blank">postmaster@tug.org</a><br><a href="http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex" target="_blank">http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex</a><br>
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