[XeTeX] Syriac Script

[Jonathan Kew]

On 18 Oct 2005, at 8:20 pm, Malte Rosenau wrote:
>>
>> The other way to get Syriac to work in XeTeX would be via an AAT
>> Syriac font -- but I'm not aware of any that are available. A
>> knowledgeable developer would be able to add AAT tables to the Meltho
>> fonts, I guess, but there are not many skilled AAT font table
>> programmers around.
>>
>
> Would this work out of the box with XeTeX if those AAT tables were  
> available?

Yes, it would, as AAT uses a model where *all* the contextual  
rendering behavior is built into the font tables and executed by a  
generic engine, rather than relying on separate engines for each  
complex script, as OpenType does.

> FontForge has some limited support for AAT, maybe I can convert one  
> of the
> Melto fonts  (it's an TTF flavoured OTF, but I doubt that it will  
> convert the
> contextual stuff automatically) and add those tables myself...

I'm sure it wouldn't happen automatically; I'm not sure whether the  
AAT support in FF is adequate to handle Syriac, but I suspect it may  
not be. Most likely you'd need to understand the AAT contextual  
processing mechanism, which is based on finite state machines, and  
create custom state tables to implement the Syriac rules. It's a  
steep learning curve, but can be done (for example, with Apple's font  
tool collection).

JK