[XeTeX] XeTeX & sanskrit: which font

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/8/15 Steve White <stevan.white at googlemail.com>:
> Hi Zdenek,
>
> All the tests we were doing on the FreeSerif Devanagari  were in the
> stock Ubuntu distro version of Firefox.
> No special settings were made.
>
> Have you sorted this out?
>
There is a basic difference between RHEL based distros (CentOS etc)
and Debian based distros (Ubuntu, Kubuntu etc). While Debian based
distros follow quickly development f new software, RHEL sticks with
well tested SW in order to ensure stability. Thus what works on Debian
based distros need not work on RHEL based distros just because
everything is older. If a program does not exist as a package, it
sometimes cannot be compiled from sources. For instance, Gnome
Subtitles exists as a .deb package and as .rpm for several versions of
Fedora but not for CentOS. I was not able to compile it because not
only this program but also several libraries require newer version of
gtk and glibc. Thus immediate solution may be impossible.

> I seem to remember some bugs having to do with web fonts... I would
> have to dig through my notes.
> Something like... some browsers turn off some features when fonts are
> included over the Web (this is a very hazy memory).
>
It would be nice to have this information. Maybe I will prepare an
EPUB in Hindi and it would be nice to know, how reading devices will
handle GNU FreeFont. I have only EPUB reader as a plugin in Mozilla
and can ask a friend to test it on iPad.

> Cheers
>
> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2012/8/15 Jonathan Kew <jfkthame at googlemail.com>:
>>> On 15/8/12 12:09, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'm not sure why the language-specific behavior in FreeSerif isn't
>>>> working in Firefox; I thought that was supported, but it appears to be
>>>> broken. Will try to investigate...
>>>>
>>>
>>> Oh, of course... it only works if you tell Firefox to use the harfbuzz
>>> back-end for Indic shaping (which is still somewhat experimental). By
>>> setting gfx.font_rendering.harfbuzz.scripts to -1 in about:config, it works
>>> as expected, at least in current test builds (Nightly / Aurora) -- I'm not
>>> sure if this is fully supported in the final release version yet.
>>>
>> Maybe it is not available for CentOS 5 and I cannot afford to upgrade
>> this computer now.
>>
>>> JK
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --------------------------------------------------
>>> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>>>  http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Zdeněk Wagner
>> http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
>> http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
>>
>>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------
>> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>>   http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>   http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz