Dear Hans,

We were originally preparing the example for XeTeX (which behaves very
weird anyway) and I would like to know how to typeset Ethiopic text in
ConTeXt.

The basic requirements are:

- Words may be split after any character (character = syllable; it's
in the range "1200-"139F), but not before word/sentence dividers. (We
have hyphenation patterns, but one could just as well use some other
mechanism to break.)

- "1361 and "1362 are word dividers and sentence dividers.

- One doesn't use spaces when writing.

- In output one should get something like space (approximately the
same width) before and something like space after word/sentence
divider, except that the "space" before divider should not be
breakable; I highly suspect that the amount of space before/after
dividers depends on the font being used, but I may be wrong.
- Text should be nicely justified (I wonder if microtypography would also help).

I'm attaching a sample text that does approximately what I expect it
to do, but I would like to avoid active characters, make the space
before and after divider of equal size and I'm not sure what is the
most appropriate approach in ConTeXt. The example also leaves a bit
too much whitespace after dividers that end the line.

Here's the font used in the example:
   http://scripts.sil.org/AbyssinicaSIL_Download

Thanks a lot,
    Mojca

PS: In char-def.lua see

 [0x1361]={
  category="po",
  description="ETHIOPIC WORDSPACE",
  direction="l",
  linebreak="ba",
  unicodeslot=0x1361,
 },

where linebreak="ba" means "break after" or "allow break after this
character". But I guess that ConTeXt ignores those meanings at the
moment.

Attachment: context-geez.tex
Description: TeX document

Attachment: lang-mul-ethi.lua
Description: Binary data

Attachment: lang-mul-ethi.pat
Description: Binary data

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