[XeTeX] anti-xunicode ;-)

[Jonathan Kew]

On 23 Jul 2006, at 2:09 pm, Adam Twardoch wrote:
>
> Of course XeTeX would do good if it did canonical reordering of marks.
> As I’ve written, *well-made* fonts should not rely on marks being
> canonically ordered, but some fonts will only contain rendering rules
> for canonically ordered marks. Canonical reordering surely would
> minimize the risk of bad renderings.

Yes, in many cases, but not always. There are some cases (e.g.,  
Arabic diacritics) where the canonical order differs significantly  
from the linguistically "logical" order which is most commonly found  
in text (because it's the natural order for people to type), and many  
current fonts will render the text correctly *only* if it is in  
"natural" order and *not* canonical.

This is a font shortcoming, of course, but issues like this make me  
reluctant to hard-wire behavior into xetex. If you want normalization  
as part of the rendering process, you can explicitly add a  
normalizing font-mapping.

JK