[XeTeX] Color Hebrew Vowel Points

[Joshua Grauman]

I was able to achieve fairly good results with pdftx, 
http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk

Thanks for the help and ideas.

Josh

> Thank you for your input and suggestions. I'm not 100% sure, but I think
> there *are* occassions where adding a diacritic changes the spacing
> somewhat. However, I think this is rare, so your suggestion is still
> probably valid in most cases.
>
> I would like to try your last suggestion about overprinting. However, I
> don't have any idea how to "overprint" either in XeTeX or OpenOffice or
> whatever. Frankly, I would like to use OpenOffice to create the charts.
> For making a critical edition XeTeX is great, for a simple chart...
> Anyway, I was wondering if any of you ps/pdf experts knew how to overlay
> two ps files like Jonathan is suggesting... Thanks.
>
> Josh
>
>>> 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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