Hi All (I posted a copy of this mail to the XeTeX mailing list also. Apologies if you are subscribed to both.)
I have been using XeTeX to test the rendering of Devanagari using different fonts and layout engines. Here is a sample containing multiple renderings of a word from the Rig Veda. Sample Rendering : http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2755/4250942627_469615ffbc_o.png TeX source : http://gist.github.com/270468 The first four are using OpenType fonts (Nakula, Sahadeva, Akshar and Gargi respectively). The last one uses Devanagari MT. In my (not so expert) opinion, the Devangari MT/AAT rendering while not perfect, is superior to the OpenType rendering by a fair stretch. I am mailing this list to get some insights about the rendering process, and see if anything can be done to improve it for OpenType fonts. Specifically : 1. Why is the OpenType/ICU rendering bad, compared to AAT. Is it the font, or is it the layout engine, or both? My limited understanding is that the Devangari MT font contains glyph layout information within itself, as opposed to the OpenType fonts which rely more on software to layout the glyphs. Is there an inherent advantage in the font containing the layout information, or can software be made to replicate a similar quality? 2. What can be done to improve this? Are there better fonts? Does a later version of ICU (i believe XeTeX uses ICU 4.0) contain any enhancements? 3. Can anyone tell if Uniscribe on Windows Vista does a better job. I would appreciate a sample, since I dont have a Windows system here to test it out myself. Thanks Deepak _______________________________________________ Devnag-general mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sarovar.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devnag-general
