[XeTeX] Color Hebrew Vowel Points

Jonathan Kew jonathan_kew at sil.org
Tue Jul 24 22:01:26 CEST 2007


On 24 Jul 2007, at 6:32 pm, Joshua Grauman wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I've been trying to create some Hebrew charts (using SIL's Ezra 2.5  
> Hebrew
> Unicode font) and I'm having difficulty coloring the vowel points a
> different color than the consonants they are on. If I color them  
> different
> colors, the vowel points are no longer positioned correctly (they  
> move to
> the left side of the consonant). What is interesting is that the exact
> same behavior is displayed in OpenOffice 2.2.0, Qt 4.3.0 QTextEdit,  
> and
> XeTeX 0.996 (I'm using a texlive 2007 install on Linux). I had just  
> wanted
> to create a few charts in OpenOffice, but when that didn't work was  
> trying
> to find any way to color vowels and their consonants differently.  
> Is this
> even possible with Unicode fonts?

In theory, it could be possible; in practice, I am not aware of any  
current rendering engine that will support this. When you apply a  
different color to the diacritics, you are breaking the text into  
separate "style runs" (or whatever the particular implementation  
calls them), and shaping rules (including the mark positioning that  
is used for the diacritics in Ezra SIL) are applied separately to the  
runs. So the diacritics no longer "see" the base consonants that you  
want to position them on.

MS Word in Windows has an option to "color diacritics", which might  
come close, but even that will fail whenever the font implements a  
particular base+diacritic combination using a single composite glyph.  
And that's a global option, not something you can apply to specific  
fragments of text within a document (it's not implemented at the  
level of individual character styling at all).

You could of course produce your charts in XeTeX by writing custom  
macros that tweak the diacritic positions as needed, but that would  
be a pretty tedious job for more than a handful of cases.

Or you could create a couple of customized versions of the font, one  
where all the consonant glyphs are replaced by blanks (with the exact  
same metrics), and another where the vowels are similarly removed.  
Then you could set the text twice, once with each font, using  
different colors, and overlay the two versions. :-)

Actually, that gives me an idea: assuming the presence of the vowels  
does not affect the positioning of the consonants at all (is this the  
case?), you could simply print the vowelled text in one color, and  
then overprint with the consonants only in a second color. Might be  
worth a try!

JK



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