On 14-6-2010 3:21, Michael Saunders wrote:
OpenType (just ignore file extension for the moment) is a rather dump
standard in the sense that it requires the engine to have some knowledge
about the writing system at hand.
....
So, what we have here is that ConTeXt has no special knowledge about
Indic scripts, and thus it will not apply the feature properly according
the linguistic rules.
It seems to me that, since Hans can't be expected to write special
code for dozens of Indic scripts, let alone for every script in the
world, the pragmatic solution would be a method for Context to harness
external engines (ICU, Pango, Graphite, Uniscribe, or whatever). If
that's not possible, or if he doesn't want to do it, or until he is
able to work with scholars on each special case, programs like Notepad
will be able to do something that Context can't. As a casual user,
it's not an urgent need for me. I had read that Aleph functionality
had been integrated into LuaTeX (though I never found anything very
detailed about that) and thought that everything was okay. I assume
that Luatex/Context or some future TeX will have this functionality
someday, however it's implemented. I'll just keep watching.
if you want to use external engines ... use xetex instead of luatex
the whole idea behind luatex is that we have a configureable and
programmable engine ... doing some script is not so much an issue (and
we can do it more flexible once we have the machinery in place) but
information is needed ... also, as we want tex cum suis to be flexible
on the one hand and stable on the other, depending on hidden or fuzzy
features in en uniscribe engine might not be the best idea
in the oriental tex project we've spend quite some time on high quality
arabic and i'm sure that we could not have come this far if we had wrote
the code from scratch (all this font technology is not as open as the
name suggest) ... also, there's more in mkiv than shown so far (esp in
that area) for those experiments
Hans
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Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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