[XeTeX] OT: scripts, glyphs and Cocoa text editing

[Jonathan Kew]

On 9 Nov 2005, at 12:05 am, musa furber wrote:

>
> On Nov 8, 2005, at 8:41 PM, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>
>
>> [...]
>>
>>> Can anyone suggest a workaround, short of removing Lotus, editing  
>>> Geeza, or making Al Bayan my default font? None of these  
>>> solutions are ideal.
>>>
>>
>> I'm familiar with the behavior, but don't have a good workaround  
>> to suggest - though a font manager utility that allows you to  
>> easily activate/deactivate Lotus might be helpful.
>>
>
> I tried this. I don't think it is an acceptable long term solution  
> for full-time Arabic editing.

Agreed. For full-time Arabic editing, I'd set my editor's (or the  
document's) default font to an Arabic font, rather than leave it set  
to a Latin font and then rely on the text system to go and find  
Arabic fonts for the Arabic characters.

If I set the font of a document in TeXShop to Geeza Pro, for example,  
it seems to work fine to insert U+FDFA (getting a Lotus glyph) in the  
midst of Arabic text, and then continue typing in Geeza.

> Do you know if there are similar problems in with other scripts?

There's certainly the potential for similar problems, if you install  
fonts that include the relevant characters, but don't provide the  
appropriate behavior (when used in the Cocoa text system that TeXShop  
etc use). For example, if you install an OpenType Hindi font and this  
gets used rather than the AAT font Devanagari MT that Apple ships, it  
won't render correctly in ATSUI/Cocoa editors.

If/when Apple enhances the system's OpenType support to handle  
complex-script shaping, it will become less of an issue, as the  
additional fonts you might care to install (such as Lotus) will be  
more likely to work.

JK