[XeTeX] FreeSerif fonts and devanagari ligatures

[Zdenek Wagner]

2014-03-10 19:49 GMT+01:00 Steve White <stevan.white at gmail.com>:
> Hi Françoise,
>
> I'm aware of some serious problems.  The development builds of FreeFont
> should resolve these.
>
> If you would like, I can give you access to development builds;
> we would be glad to hear your input.
>
> What happened is this:
>
> Before 2012 or so, the main font rendering system in Linux was
> "Pango", which emulated
> the Indic rules of Windows XP and before. The 2012 release of
> FreeFont was tested and
> working in this system.
>
> But soon after, a new rendering system "Harfbuzz", which emulates the
> very different
> rules of Windows Vista/7, was introduced.  This unfortunately broke
> all the Indic ranges in
> FreeFont (as well as many other fonts).
>
Harfbuzz broke the indic rules and the release of 2012, which is
distributed even in TeX Live 2013, does not work, there is quite a lot
of problems. I got several times a snapshot from Steve, I reported the
problems and quite a long time ago I reported that it passes all my
tests. This book was typeset using TeX Live 2013 (with Harfbuzz) and
the snapshot of FreeFont:

http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/ArunakashKaRasta/

When performing the tests I found that fontconfig priorities are not
always honoured, sometimes XeTeX found the snapshot FreeFont,
sometimes the FreeFont from TeX Live. As a result I was receiving
unpredictable mess. After forcibly uninstalling FreeFont from TeX
Live, so that I had jus one FreeFont installed, everything started to
work.

> We have put a lot of work into updating the fonts, but not all the
> ranges are tested yet.
> --and it may be a while yet, due partly to limitations on my own time.
>
> Cheers!
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 7:14 PM, François Patte
> <francois.patte at mi.parisdescartes.fr> wrote:
>> Bonjour,
>>
>>
>> It seems to me that some ligatures are missing in FreeSerif fonts if I
>> use the devanagari script; as far as I tested these ones are missing:
>>
>> tr, pr, śr
>>
>>
>> Moreover, slanted devanagari glyphs are lacking
>>
>> Am I right, or I use an obsolete version of these fonts (from texlive-2013).
>>
>> Thank you
>> --
>> François Patte
>> UFR de mathématiques et informatique
>> Laboratoire CNRS MAP5, UMR 8145
>> Université Paris Descartes
>> 45, rue des Saints Pères
>> F-75270 Paris Cedex 06
>> Tél. +33 (0)1 8394 5849
>> http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte
>>
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz