[XeTeX] Separate fonts for Latin and Greek with fontspec?

Michiel Kamermans pomax at nihongoresources.com
Fri Sep 17 13:14:00 CEST 2010


On 9/17/2010 3:36 AM, BPJ wrote:
> 1. What about a command for defining arbitrary ranges?  This would be 
> useful if one mucks around in different subblocks of the PUAs, 
> particularly.  Something like: 
> \setTransitionRange{<RangeStartNum>}{<RangeEndNum>}{<RangeStartCmds>}{<RangeEndCmds>} 
>
>

And why not. It's easy enough to define, I'll stick it in the next 
"version".

> Too bad BTW that "Phonetics" isn't definable as an informal group!

Indeed, but that exposes the inherent problem of multiple languages 
using scripts that overlap with other languages... I don't know how hard 
it would be to assign letters to multiple classes, and then trigger 
transition rules only if the character is in one, but not both, classes 
involved in the transition. This would have to be done at the XeTeX 
level, though (Jonathan? =) and removing characters from specific 
classes might actually be too hard, simply warranting a 
\XeTeXremoveAllClasses followed by a new sequence of 
\XeTeXintercharclass assignments.

That said, I'd love to have characters bindable to multiple classes, 
with a top level command that allows or disallows that (similar to how 
interchartoks can be turned on/off). Of course it would still lead to 
interesting new situations where a sentence might be, say, Vietnamese 
but start with a normal Latin character. Which transition rule fires? 
Boundary-to-Latin or Boundary-to-Vietnamese?

Unicode went with "scripts", but that's basically equivalent to doing 
what Polyglossia does, where you indicate what the following stretch of 
text is. It works great, but you have to put in more commands, and the 
source becomes hard to read if you switch languages several times on a 
page, or within a paragraph.

- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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