[XeTeX] XeTeX & sanskrit: which font

[hanneder at staff.uni-marburg.de]

Sorry for extending this discussion a bit, and perhaps beyond the main  
focus of the list. But I wanted to summarize my recent struggles with  
the font question when producing a book in Devanagari and XeTeX. In  
short, I checked all fonts available including a large number of free  
Devanagari fonts (distributed during the World Sanskrit Conference)  
and found them inadequate in one or the other respect. Usually there  
are problems you notice only when typesetting and proofreading a whole  
book, for instance, certain combinations of consonants simply do not  
work, or produce wrong results. In the old days one would tweak the  
font, but with otf I have no clue how to start.

So I was was back to where I started: The fonts Sanskrit 2003 and  
Nakula. Now Sanskrit 2003 does not work nicely, especially if you have  
Roman text also, since it is a bold font for "heavy" verse editions,  
not for reading longer prose. So it was Nakula! There, unfortunately  
some ligatures are in areas of the unicode range where XeTeX cannot  
find them (right at the end), so that altough they are there, they  
cannot be used. I am currently trying to find someone who can improve  
the font. Any help is most welcome.

Jürgen



---

Prof. Dr. Juergen Hanneder
Philipps-Universitaet Marburg
FG Indologie u. Tibetologie
Deutschhausstr.12
35032 Marburg
Germany
Tel. 0049-6421-28-24930
hanneder at staff.uni-marburg.de