[XeTeX] Beginner: Devanagari problems

[Jonathan Kew]

On 15 Feb 2008, at 11:03 am, Sven Siegmund wrote:

> Hello, good people,
>
> yesterday I just started using the whole LaTeX thing, right away with
> XeTeX. I downloaded MiKTeX 2.7.2960, part of which is XeTeX. (So I
> think all versions of all my packages are the most current.)
>
> I am facing problems with typestting Devanagari. In Texmaker, in the
> UTF-16 encoded devanagari.tex document the Devanagari renders as this:
> http://siegmund.szm.sk/latex/devanagari.png
> (which is exactly as it should be)
>
> when I run "xelatex devanagari" in the resulting PDF the Devanagari
> sequencing is messed up and ligatures are messed up, too.
>
> What am I doing wrong?
>
> Here are my files:
> http://siegmund.szm.sk/latex/devanagari.tex
> http://siegmund.szm.sk/latex/devanagari.aux
> http://siegmund.szm.sk/latex/devanagari.log
> http://siegmund.szm.sk/latex/devanagari.pdf


You need to give the option

   [Script=Devanagari]

when loading a font through Fontspec in order to activate the  
Devanagari OpenType shaping engine.

See the fontspec documentation for more...

JK