On 3/24/2018 7:15 AM, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
Unfortunately, we discovered at the very end of this project that LuaTeX is
mis-rendering Tamil text.
It’s unfortunate that you embarked in a project that includes texts in
Tamil and Bengali without checking whether LuaTeX was able to render it
properly. The LuaTeX project has always been very clear, from the
beginning, that LuaTeX wouldn’t do any rendering at all. This is by
design.
My excuse is that it never occurred to me that LuaTeX would not have
this capability... and web search just now didn't turn up any obvious
disclaimers along those lines, although I did run into some projects
aimed at using HarfBuzz from LuaTeX (as mentioned in yours and Luigi's
emails just now). But we used XeTeX with reasonably good results on
Bengali before XeTeX switched over to HarfBuzz, so the fact that LuaTeX
doesn't (so far) use HarfBuzz wouldn't have struck me as too worrisome
if I had noticed it earlier...
Anyway, I think I have a work-around that involves initially typesetting
in LuaTeX, then using the output from LuaTeX to tell XeTeX where to
place each line of text on the page. A real kludge, and untested as
yet, but it will probably work (perhaps with slightly ragged right
margins, but for our purposes that's unimportant).
--
Mike Maxwell
"My definition of an interesting universe is
one that has the capacity to study itself."
--Stephen Eastmond
