[XeTeX] Syriac: Vowels misplaced

[Jonathan Kew]

On 27 Apr 2007, at 7:47 am, Thomas Thackery wrote:

> Attached are two images.  The first is from XeLaTeX where I set a  
> Unicode compliant typeface \newfontfamily{\syr}[Scale=1.2] 
> {Estrangelo Talada} to typeset a sentence in Syriac.  This same  
> sentence is then represented in the word-processor Mellel™.   In  
> the Mellel example, the vowels appear correctly.  When this same  
> text is typeset with XeLaTeX, the vowels crowd towards the  
> baseline.   Is the "reason" for this related to the font itself? If  
> so, what in the font file would one need to adjust?

In addition to the misplaced vowels, you're not getting proper Syriac  
connecting forms of the letters. This is because you need to specify  
the Syriac script shaping behavior in your font declaration:

    \newfontfamily{\syr}[Script=Syriac,Scale=1.2]{Estrangelo Talada}

should do it.

HTH,

JK