[XeTeX] Nasta'liq fonts

[maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu]

Jonathan Kew wrote:
> On 20 Feb 2008, at 6:47 pm, maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu wrote:
>> Does anyone here have experience with Nasta'liq fonts?
>
> My experience trying these fonts with XeTeX has been rather mixed;
> there seem to be some limitations in the ICU OpenType support, so
> often the glyph positioning doesn't fully work.

So what programs are these fonts intended to work well with?

> ...The best results I've seen so far have come
> with Monotype's OpenType version of Noori
> Nastaliq, but this is a commercial font rather
> than freely available.

And I've never been able to get any response from them about it (there
doesn't seem to be any kind of email link on their website, and there's no
mention of this font on the fonts.com website that their "sales" link
points to).  The font is listed on their website with the following
disclaimer:

   Because of its calligraphic nature, Noori Nastaliq
   is not available as a standard font for the common
   hardware platforms. The addressing of this font
   requires specially customized software and ligature
   access tables.

I'm assuming from your response that XeTeX is able to use this font?

> It's also possible that future updates to the OpenType support in
> XeTeX will improve things....

You wouldn't by chance have, like, a timetable for this...

Tomas Milo (of DecoType) is also working on Nastaliq support, but my
understanding is that what they are going to produce is not so much a font
as some kind of rendering machine.  But I probably don't understand.

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD