[XeTeX] arabic diacritics breaking words in Linux xelatex

[Zdenek Wagner]

2015-02-14 6:40 GMT+01:00 Kamal Abdali <k.abdali at acm.org>:
> Nicholas,
>
> Thanks for testing the file. Another member, who wrote directly to me, also
> got correct output from TEX Live 2013 under a slightly older version of Open
> SUSE.
>
In such a case it looks like a bug in HarfBuzz and you should report
it. I have just tried your file with all versions of TeX Live from
2009 to 2014 and it works fine (up to 2012 ICU was used, since 2013
HarfBuzz is used).

> Not knowing what else to do, I uninstalled TeXLive 13 and installed TeXLive
> 14. The latter is not pre-packaged on Open SUSE 13.2, so I had to install it
> from the TeXLive 14 DVD. This was a desperate step, but that other version
> version of TeX did solve the problem.
>
> Incidentally, the TeX Live ISO doesn't contain a binary of Texworks for
> Linux. Open SUSE does, of course, have Texworks as a package. But in Open
> SUSE the package dependencies are such that when you ask it to install
> Texworks, it wants to install the whole TeXLive 13 again! So I had to
> download Texworks sources and make it from scratch.
>
Yes, such dependencies exist probably in all Linux distributions.
Debian offers equivalence package so that these dependencies are
satisfied with TeX Live installed from TUG. I have enough space on
disk thus I accepted TeX from the Fedora distribution but installed
TeX Live in addition. It is sufficient to have the TeX Live binaries
listed at the beginning of PATH and do not create symlinks. I have all
TeX Live versions from 2007 to 2014 and can switch between them just
by changing PATH. There may be ther dependencies so it is better to do
it this way, otherwise on day TeX from SuSU may be instaled. If you
have TeX Live's binary at the beginning of PATH, such installation
will not break your setup, it will just eat some disk space.

> Thanks for your help.
>
> Kamal
>

Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



> On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 11:47 PM, heer <heer at u.washington.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Kamal,
>>
>>         I'm using Tex Live 2013 on Ubuntu 14.04 and your file works
>> perfectly.  All the letters are properly connected.
>>
>> Nicholas
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 12 Feb 2015, Kamal Abdali wrote:
>>
>>> Normally any letter that gets joined to the next letter in a word does so
>>> whether or not it bears a diacritic. But Tex Live 2013 on SUSE Linux is
>>> causing such a letter to be printed in its independent rather than
>>> connected
>>> form when there is a diacritic on it. This is my first attempt to use
>>> xetex
>>> on a Linux machine to process a document in the Arabic script. I have
>>> never
>>> seen such an error on Windows or MacOS.
>>>
>>> If this forum is not the right place to report the problem, perhaps some
>>> member can kindly direct me to the proper place. An example is the
>>> following:
>>> =========
>>> %xelatex
>>>
>>> \documentclass{minimal}
>>>
>>> \usepackage{fontspec,bidi}
>>>
>>> \newfontfamily\a[Script=Arabic]{Amiri}
>>>
>>> \begin{document}
>>>
>>> \setRTL
>>>
>>> \a
>>>
>>> قلم قَلَم قلَم قندیل قِندِیل قلوب قُلُوب قُلوب
>>>
>>> \end{document}
>>>
>>> ========
>>> The TeX output is equivalent to:
>>> ========
>>> قلم  قَ لَ م   قلَ م  قندیل  قِ ندِیل  قلوب  قُ لُ وب  قُ لوب
>>> ========
>>>
>>> Kamal Abdali
>>>
>>
>>
>>
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