[XeTeX] Auto Font and Language Package in XeTeX (Khaled Hosny)

[Khaled Hosny]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 07:34:00AM +0530, Venkatesan. S.K. (TNQ) wrote:
> 
> 
>     On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 05:15:13PM +0530, Venkatesan. S.K. (TNQ) wrote:
>     > I suppose these are early days for unicode, especially for Indic, Hebrew
>     and
>     > Arabic.
> 
>     I'm not sure if I understand what you mean by "early" here, but Arabic
>     have been part of Unicode since 1.1 (cr. 1993), bidi algorithm even
>     predates Unicode.
> 
>     Regards,
>      Khaled
> 
>     --
>      Khaled Hosny
>      Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
>      Free font developer
> 
> 
> When Arabic and English and Tamil are mixed in UTF-8 I can demonstrate
> interesting behaviors in gedit and other text editors. Many other text editors
> just render them in byte order, like byte editors, which is fine...

I fail to see how having unreadable Arabic text would be fine, unless
one don't intend to read that text of course.

> It may not be early days for the Unicode specs, but the implementing
> applications have been having finding it difficulty, not to mention that there

GNU Fribidi (the bidi implementing library used by GTK+ and thus Gedit)
have been first released in 1999, I'd not call that new either.

> have been new characters and changes being constantly made in every Unicode
> version, 5.1, 6.0, etc...The OS releases lag behind and where are the bloody
> fonts that has implemented Unicode 6.0? It is a nightmare for implementors and
> users.

New characters added to Unicode has almost no effect in how bidi is
handled by applications.

> Do unicode committee have a proof of concept application (like Amaya browser
> for W3  HTML) or a font?
> It is possible create a font using all their PDFs but license will be problem,
> I suppose...
> Each and every OS and editors show different levels of compliance...

Sorry, I don't see what fonts have to do with the issue we are
discussing here (whatever this issue actually is, you don't say what
difficulties you see/have). There are already free fonts covering all
RTL characters in Unicode, and more are being developed (I'm working on
one right now myself).

> Apart from all this, there are the users who are used to WYSIWYG paradigm and
> get very confused when there are different outputs in XML editors and the PDF
> output.
> We have had interesting problems where book authors used Arabic/Hebrew in an
> insensitive version of MS Word that doesn't switch right to left and they want
> the output that way and when we open it an recent version of MS Word or the
> other way around, we get very interesting emails and discussions. I generally
> tell them please send me a PDF and tell me what is exactly you want in the
> output, we will take care of the XML. Of course, if you use a non-Middle-East
> version of InDesign then right to left will not work; I suppose InDesign folks
> think that Arabic should not be used non-Middle-East folks...

Still, I'm not understanding what are the problem here, and how it is
related to TeX.

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer