[XeTeX] rotating glyphs (still trying to make xetex/fontspec do what I want it to)

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi all,

I'm still trying to make xetex/fontspec typeset vertical Japanese 
properly, for fonts that typeset properly in applications such as adobe 
photoshop or openoffice writer, but don't set properly in XeTeX with 
fontspec - where would I look to find out how xetex computes glyph 
position for rotated glyphs? When I apply fontspec for several fonts 
without any arguments, for instance, the glyph positioning looks fine, 
but when I issue a \fontspec[RawFeature=vertical]{fontname} or 
\fontspec[Vertical=RotatedGlyph]{fontname}, glyphs can become rather 
awkwardly positioned. For some fonts almost imperceivably, for others it 
screws up very badly, with glyphs overlapping and having wildly 
different h/v origins, and losing their monospaced look. If I add the 
opentype tags +fwid and/or +vpal to ensure monospacing, this problem 
doesn't go away.

I'm a bit puzzled why WYSIWYG editors would get this right, while a 
typesetting language does not. Consider this not so much a complaint but 
a plea: how the hell do I fix this? There's plenty of vertical 
typesetting to be done in the world, and the only thing that needs to be 
done to a font to get this working properly is glyph rotation and new 
h/v origin computation. And that last step seems to go horribly wrong 
for *quite* a number of Japanese fonts I'm trying this with.

What is particularly irking is that MS Word, OO Writer, and other 
WYSIWYG applications don't seem too bothered by the fact that some of 
these fonts, as far as the microsoft Font Properties Extension reveals, 
don't come with any opentype tags at all. They simply typeset the text 
vertically, and correctly positioned.

Does anyone who reads this list have any idea where to start looking in 
order to figure out how XeTeX deals with rotating characters, how it 
enables and disables opentype features, and how it (re)computes 
horizontal and vertical origins? I suck at C and C++, but this is 
maddening enough to want to just look at the code and figure out how to 
make it work. It's a tarnish on TeX's power that it can't do what should 
(for the user) be a simple trick, and one I'd love to remove from the 
list of "yes, TeX is great at typesetting, as long as you avoid trying 
to ..." entries for people who consider moving away from their word 
processor application. At its most basic funcational level, all that's 
required is a rotation within an em box. To quote Top Gear: "how hard 
can it be?"

- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com