[XeTeX] FreeSerif fonts and devanagari ligatures

[Khaled Hosny]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 11:11:27PM -0400, Mike Maxwell wrote:
> On 3/10/2014 8:04 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> >That being said, there are some bugs in the HarfBuzz version used in
> >TeX Live 2013 release, but this should be fixed when with 2014 upgrades
> >to the latest HarfBuzz (people using exiting XeTeX release with the
> >latest HarfBuzz, e.g. distro packages, should be fine as well).
> 
> We'll be typesetting some Bangla (Bengali script) text in June, which afaik
> is before the TeXLive 2014 comes out.
> 
> 1) Do you happen to know whether the 2013 version's bugs break Bangla?

The bugs I’m aware of aren’t related to Bengali, but the number of bugs
is small anyway so not many texts/fonts are affected.

> I suppose that's an unanswerable question, since it probably depends on the
> exact font we'll be using, and maybe the 2013 version hasn't been tested
> with Bangla anyway.  So:

AFAIK, HarfBuzz has been regularly tested for Bengali.

> 2) I assume this:
>        http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz/
>    is where I should go for the latest HarfBuzz (at the moment, the 30 Jan
> 2014 release),

Yes.

>    correct?  And that I don't need to install any revised version of
> anything else from
>    TeXLive 2013.

Things are a bit more complex. TeX Live binaries from TUG are statically
linked so that all dependencies are included in the binary, installing a
new HarfBuzz in this case has no effect on XeTeX as it will keep using
the one compiled into it. On the other hand, distributions that package
TeX Live will almost always dynamically link, so that XeTeX will be
using the system installed HarfBuzz and here updating HarfBuzz will
affect XeTeX as well. But if you can build HarfBuzz from source, you
probably can rebuild XeTeX too, it is a little harder but we can discuss
it when the need actually arises.

Regards,
Khaled