[XeTeX] XeTeX & sanskrit: which font

[Steve White]

Zdenek,

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 10:49 PM, Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 am aware of the different distribution policies.  With regard to Firefox,
only the version of Firefox is important: it has its own rendering software.

My current version of Firefox is 14.01
What's yours?

The Devanagari tests were done in releases of Firefox from earlier in the year.

Frankly, I really doubt the FIrefox version is the problem.

>> 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.
>
Maybe Jonathan can throw some light on this.

A couple of years ago, I was doing some tests of web font stuff, and
was having a lot of trouble (I was testing on Windows and LInux.)  My notes
are unfortunatly scattered and incomplete: I never did a systematic study.
But they say things like "kerning seems not to be working at all" when using
web fonts.

I also ran across this Mac issue
   https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=619061#c1
Could it be that somehow OpenType tables from web fonts are still
being "stripped" ?

You might do the following test:

With the same font and same HTML document,
View the document with Firefox:

1) With the web delivery of the the fotnt disabled, and the
font installed on your system (and caches cleared etc)

2) With web delivery of the font enabled, and the font
un-installed from the system ("" caches)

The rendering *should* be the same in both cases.
I would be glad to know the results!

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
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>   http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex