[XeTeX] Res: A typography question

[Flavio Costa]

Hi,

I know nothing about Arabic typesetting, other people may help you here, but I can give you some advice:

I don't think that the need of IPA support has to restrict your choice of roman font. I use Minion Pro (not free) for the text body and Charis SIL [Scale=.95] for the parts where IPA is necessary. It works fine, but I need IPA only in short parts, you should try a combination that looks acceptable for your specific needs. You see that scaling is important to find a match between two fonts that would otherwise look bad together, maybe this also applies to the match between Roman and Arabic.

When looking for a match between different fonts (for needs like mixing different scripts or IPA support, else you should stick to just one typeface), you should be attentive to many details: glyph metrics should be similar, the color (how "dark" the letters are) should be compatible, etc.

If you want a no-brainer solution, the easiest way to go is to adopt a typeface that supports all your needs (DejaVu family instead of Charis SIL, for instance). In my tests, to my surprise, I found that monospaced Bitstream Vera looks nicer than DejaVu mono, so the best fonts to use depend a lot on what you're going to do with them.

Best,

Flavio Costa



----- Mensagem original ----
De: Mike Maxwell <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu>
Para: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms <xetex at tug.org>
Enviadas: Segunda-feira, 3 de Agosto de 2009 0:27:26
Assunto: [XeTeX] A typography question

I know zip about fonts.  We're creating some books that have lots of IPA characters (and some other Roman characters with diacritics), as well as Arabic (Nasta'liq and now Naskh).  So it would be nice to choose fonts that go together harmoniously.

The need for IPA coverage rules out a lot of fonts.

[...]



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