[XeTeX] xetex and the unicode bidirectional algorithm.

Jonathan Kew jfkthame at googlemail.com
Thu Dec 5 16:52:29 CET 2013


On 5/12/13 12:48, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> Can anyone point me to docs on XeT--TeX?  A Google the other day failed
> to turn up anything useful.
>

(TeX--XeT, not XeT--TeX.)

This is part of e-TeX; see the e-TeX manual[1], section 4.1.

HTH,

JK

[1] http://tug.ctan.org/systems/e-tex/v2/doc/etex_man.pdf

> Also: polyglossia appears to be doing some amount of LTR/RTL
> directionality switching based on the character block.  Can anyone offer
> advice on how to avoid fighting with that, if I'm implementing my own
> bidi algorithm?
>
> Finally: any advice on using CJK languages with polyglossia?  Embedded
> CJK is quite common.  Should I be writing gloss-ja etc files to set the
> right directionality and font and get the appropriate CJK support
> packages loaded?
>    --scott
>
> On Dec 5, 2013 5:42 AM, "Jonathan Kew" <jfkthame at googlemail.com
> <mailto:jfkthame at googlemail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 4/12/13 13:24, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>
>         The goal is to match the Unicode bidi algorithm, because that is
>         how the
>         web page displays and thus how the original author saw the text
>         as they
>         wrote.
>
>
>     This would be a nice enhancement, but would require a significant
>     amount of work (or in other words, it's not likely to get
>     implemented quickly, if at all).
>
>     Currently, typesetting bidi text with xetex requires correct use of
>     the TeX--XeT bidi commands (\beginR, \endR, \beginL, \endL) to mark
>     up the text direction. These could be used directly, or via
>     higher-level markup that's tagging script and language, but you
>     definitely need them to be present in some way.
>
>     Sorry, that's not what you want to hear, but it's how things are. At
>     this point, I think the most practical way forward in your situation
>     is probably to implement this as part of whatever tool is taking the
>     wikipedia content and converting it to (Xe)LaTeX markup - that tool
>     could inspect the content of each element it's processing, and add
>     any necessary direction controls for XeTeX.
>
>     JK
>
>         Guessing the proper language tag to use is likely infeasible;
>         note that the example given contains titles in Turkish as well as
>         English.  The safest option is probably to treat embedded LTR
>         text in an
>         RTL context as 'exotic' and not to attempt hyphenation.
>
>         I've heard it said that LuaTeX has "better bidi support".  What does
>         that mean, exactly? Should I be considering switching?
>             --scott
>
>         On Dec 4, 2013 4:08 AM, "Keith J. Schultz"
>         <schultzk at uni-trier.de <mailto:schultzk at uni-trier.de>
>         <mailto:schultzk at uni-trier.de <mailto:schultzk at uni-trier.de>>__>
>         wrote:
>
>              Hi Scott,
>
>              Am 03.12.2013 um 19:42 schrieb C. Scott Ananian
>         <cscott at cscott.net <mailto:cscott at cscott.net>
>              <mailto:cscott at cscott.net <mailto:cscott at cscott.net>>>:
>
>               >
>               > But in the XeLaTeX/polyglossia/bidi output, the "soft
>         space" weak
>               > directionality of the Unicode BiDi algorithm doesn't
>         seem to be
>               > honored (or implemented?) and so the English article
>         titles appear
>               > with the individual words in RTL order, which is a mess.
>           Manually
>               > tagging the language of the article title is probably
>         the Right
>              thing,
>               > but infeasible for the entire wikipedia.
>                       Well, without proper tagging you can not expect
>         any system to
>                       work properly or as expected!
>                       For most entries a simple script should do the
>         trick to add the
>                       language tags to the article titles.
>
>              Hope this helps
>                       regards
>                               Keith.
>
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