[XeTeX] Syriac in Polyglossia

[François Charette]

François Charette wrote:
> Gareth Hughes wrote:
>   
>> I can't manage to get numerals=eastern or abjadsyriac to work. 
>>     
> The option numerals=eastern affects the numerals generated from counters 
> (pagination, footnotes, etc.) To display 2008 in Syriac according to the 
> above option, you need to type \syriacnumber{2008}. I agree that this is 
> not very clear in the documentation. I'll improve that! For abjadsyriac 
> see below. But if you want the numbers 0123456789 to appear 
> automatically as ٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩ you can define \syriacfont as follows:
>
> \newfontfamily\syriacfont[Script=Syriac,Mapping=arabicdigits]{Estrangelo Edessa}
>
> I know, this is undocumented. Should this occur by default? Some rendering engines (e.g. Pango) appear to do that substitution automatically with Syriac. I should look further into this. 
>   
The Unicode Standard 5.0, p. 286, states that "Modern Syriac employs 
European numerals, as does Hebrew". So the default behavior of 
polyglossia appears to be legitimate.

BTW thanks Gareth for your report. I realize some improvements to the 
documentation are necessary (hopefully in time for TL2008).

Regards,

François