[XeTeX] XeTeX vertical text layout support (for Linux & win32 users)

[Ralf Stubner]

Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org> writes:

> I looked at FZHeiTi.ttf, one of the fonts on my SuSE machine, and it  
> has a 'vert' feature that substitutes 71 glyphs with alternate forms,  
> either rotated glyph images or with modified positioning. I looked  
> with FontLab; I guess FontForge would also work, or otfinfo (from  
> LCDF TypeTools) could tell you that the feature exists, but I don't  
> think it would show the actual glyphs.

With FontForge, you can see the replacements in 'View -> Show ATT'.
There also is 'View -> Display Substitutions', which can be used to
display the effekt of Substitution rules such as the 'vert' feature. It
seems as if one has to use 'Encoding -> Reencode -> Original' at the
moment, though.

With otfinfo, one can at least see that such a feature exists:

$ otfinfo --scripts /usr/share/fonts/truetype/kochi/kochi-mincho.ttf 
kana            Hiragana/Katakana
kana.JAN        Hiragana/Katakana/Japanese
$ otfinfo -f --script=kana /usr/share/fonts/truetype/kochi/kochi-mincho.ttf 
vert    Vertical Writing

cheerio
ralf