[texhax] Justification through glyph variants

[Khaled Hosny]

On Tue, Dec 06, 2011 at 01:44:44PM -0500, Joel C. Salomon wrote:
> On 12/06/2011 12:29 AM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> > ConTeXt has an experimental support for justification through glyph
> > alternates (for Arabic), it requires support in the font (OpenType
> > features that when applied will change word width), check the file
> > node-spl.mkiv (part of ConTeXt) for some documentation and examples.
> 
> I don't think there's an OpenType feature for this in Hebrew fonts.

There is 'jalt' (usually implemented as a simple multiple substitution
feature), I recall reading some Hebrew fonts that have and some versions
of InDesign support it (ME edition I think), but ConTeXt is quite
flexible, you can give it any feature name (even tags that are not
officially registered). There is even a whole JSTF table in OpenType
standard which offers the same flexibility ConTeXt have now, but I'm not
aware of any application that support it, not even LuaTeX (recent
version of FontForge can write it, though).

> It's not like Arabic; justification by stretching is not normally done
> in Hebrew, except in rather specialized situation, where this is usually
> done by hand.

I know, but I solution that works for the complex case should work for
the new one (and even Latin script can benefit from it; the alternate
glyphs technique was used by Gutenberg, if some one wants to replicate
this for a reason or another.)

Regards,
 Khaled