[XeTeX] Combining pair of vowels to single base char in Hebrew

mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca
Wed Dec 11 00:30:03 CET 2013


On Tue, 10 Dec 2013, Gildas Hamel wrote:
> When I transfer the text to my TeX editor (TextMate), the order and
> direction of consonants is correct but the order of the pair of vowels
> mentioned above (pataḥ and ḥiriq) is switched: לִירוּשָׁלִַם
> This is also true of my browser's rendition of the text (Safari 7.0)inhttp://www.stepbible.org/#!__/0/passage/2/OHB/Isa%2044/VNU/__/1/passage/0
> /ESV/Isa%2044/NHV

What version of XeTeX are you using?  Are the fonts involved freely
available?

I suspect that the contextual substitutions in the font that doesn't work
may involve "ignore sub" rules.  The ICU library used by XeTeX until
recently was buggy and couldn't handle those rules.  Recent versions of
XeTeX have switched to Harfbuzz, which handles "ignore sub" rules
correctly, and the very latest version of ICU (no longer used by XeTeX)
also has fixed its bug.  ICU was used by a lot of other software besides
XeTeX, including, I think, some browsers, so that could explain the same
problem appearing in TextMate and the browser.  Since the bug only affects
certain kinds of contextual substitution rules that not all fonts use,
that could also explain why some fonts work but not others.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/


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