[XeTeX] XeTeX 0.88 released

[Jonathan Kew]

On 13 Oct 2004, at 10:42 pm, Thomas T. Pedersen wrote:

> On 12/10-2004, at 17.19, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>
>> • initial implementation of OpenType Mongolian shaping for Code2000 
>> font (script=mong)
>>   - there's a sample file demonstrating this too
>
> Amazing! I've done some quick and dirty tests with modern text samples 
> from Inner Mongolia in China and compared the output from XeTeX and 
> BabelPad (Windows XP) - I haven't run into any display errors yet even 
> though this is an "initial implementation".

That's encouraging to hear. Beyond noting that the sample text fragment 
I had seemed to render the same as on XP, it's difficult for me to tell 
how well it's working.

> On a side note:
>
> Looking at the XeTeX screenshots and the sample files, I've seen an 
> Arabic font "Scheherazade" mentioned. What is this font? Is it 
> OpenType or AAT and is it a commercial font or a SIL internal one? I'm 
> just curious as the font in the screenshot of "Arabic-script text 
> within a Unicode TeX document" is very nice-looking and seems to cover 
> a broad range of Arabic characters.

It's a font being developed within SIL, with both AAT and OpenType 
support. It's currently in testing, with the hope that it will be 
publicly released fairly soon (no, I'm not promising any dates!). It is 
intended to cover all the Arabic-script characters in the Unicode 
standard, in a typical "simplified Naskh" typestyle.

Jonathan