[XeTeX] Xenotype font and Syriac scripting

Jonathan Kew jfkthame at googlemail.com
Tue Jan 5 19:44:42 CET 2010


On 5 Jan 2010, at 18:39, Khaled Hosny wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 06:11:32PM +0000, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>> On 4 Jan 2010, at 21:52, Fr. Michael Gilmary wrote:
>> 
>>> Curiously, the "Kashida" code you've given before, Jonathan, breaks the scripting. But that's a minor concern.
>> 
>> This indicates (I believe) that the AAT tables in the font do not support the Zero-Width Joiner character (ZWJ, U+200D), which is needed to get the correct joining forms where the kashida rules are inserted. You could raise this with the font developer, who may simply not have considered this issue.
> 
> I thought that AAT fonts can do more smart kashida justification?

In theory, yes. In practice, only a few AAT fonts have the necessary 'just' table. For example, Apple's Arabic fonts (or at least some of them) support this, but few if any 3rd-party ones do, at least of those I'm familiar with.

If you *do* have such a font, then you should NOT use the macro hack for "kashida" support, as it will just interfere.

JK




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