[XeTeX] arabic diacritics breaking words in Linux xelatex

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Sun Feb 15 23:15:56 CET 2015


You should report it to SUSE, HarfBuzz is correct, only its version
distributed by SUSE is wrong.
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz


2015-02-15 23:11 GMT+01:00 Kamal Abdali <k.abdali at acm.org>:
> Hi Zdeněk,
>
> With TexLive 2014 installed from DVD and Texworks built from sources per
> https://code.google.com/p/texworks/wiki/Building, the bizarre unconnected
> letter problem has gone away. It seems specific to the texlive 2013 package
> collection that comes with OpenSUSE 13.2. I'll take your advice and report
> the problem to HarfBuzz. Thanks for your attention.
>
> Kamal
>
> On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 5:13 AM, Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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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