Re: [XeTeX] XeLaTeX documentation initiative

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 12/23/2010 5:54 AM, David Perry wrote:

Dear List,

A while back Mike Kamermans got us off to a really good start on 
documentation for XeLaTeX users and people seemed enthusiastic about 
it.  I had planned to write a couple of sections during my Christmas 
break.  A quick check just now shows that nothing has happened.  What 
do you all think?  Is it worthwhile for me to add something, or is the 
project not going to get anywhere?  Certainly something like this 
would have been very helpful for me when I started, and I am willing 
to contribute if there's any hope that others will jump in.


Nice timing, I just had my last day at work today, which actually gives 
me a free week before I immigrate from the Netherlands to Canada, thus 
giving me some time to *actually* get words on virtual paper. Please, 
add as much as you care to, and I'll be doing the same over the next few 
days!


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Auto Font and Language Package in XeTeX

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 12/22/2010 6:28 AM, Yves Codet wrote:

Hello Michiel.

Thanks a lot for this package.

There's a small typo in the documentation; if I understand well the paragraph 
4.3 should read \setTransitionsFor[3], not \setTransitions[3].
   


Quite so, I shall fix that and submit the update to CTAN =D


Without polyglossia (essai1.tex below) I got the expected result, but with 
polyglossia (essai2.tex) XeTeX seems to enter an infinite loop; the error 
message is:

./essai2.tex:15: TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [save size=5].
  ...ex \...@gobble \let \glossary \...@gobble

l.15 भ
 वान्कः। \\
No pages of output.
Transcript written on essai2.log.
   


Hmm, I'm seeing the same error, and I suspect it's because I didn't 
write the command with enough sense to protect \begin and \end 
instructions... come to think of it, I'm not sure how to protect those. 
Any package writers willing to quickly solve that one? =)


- Mike





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Re: [XeTeX] Auto Font and Language Package in XeTeX (Khaled Hosny)

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 12/21/2010 6:04 PM, Venkatesan. S.K. (TNQ) wrote:
Do unicode committee have a proof of concept application (like Amaya 
browser for W3  HTML) or a font?


They don't need a PoC application, as the algorithms are fully 
described. The problems usually occur when specific font features need 
to be applied in a specific order, and the font engine either lacks the 
capability to apply them in the right order, or the capability to apply 
them at all. Being Unicode and OpenType compliant (rather than just 
compatible) is a fiendishly complex job.


As for the font, the Unicode Consortium uses many different fonts, all 
contributed by numerous foundries and individuals (see 
http://unicode.org/charts/fonts.html)


It is possible create a font using all their PDFs but license will be 
problem, I suppose...


Rather! You are, in fact, expressly forbidden from extracting any font 
used in the Unicode specification PDF files.



Each and every OS and editors show different levels of compliance...


This is mostly because they all use different engines. Your OS will use 
Uniscribe, Core Text or (most likely) Pango depending on whether it's 
windows, mac or *nix, and individual applications may completely ignore 
these render engines and use their own layout management and glyph 
fetchers instead.


Depending on how much the developers feel they need to reinvent the 
wheel because the default engines available don't offer what they need, 
applications will be more or less Unicode and OpenType compatible (I'm 
not aware of any text engine that is fully compliant, but if there is 
one, I'd love to know about it!)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com



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Re: [XeTeX] Auto Font and Language Package in XeTeX

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Yves (and everyone else)

the ucharclasses package is now on CTAN 
(http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/xetex/latex/ucharclasses/), so 
if you want to see if it breaks in combination with how you use 
polyglossia, let  me know what the result is.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Auto Font and Language Package in XeTeX

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 12/20/2010 8:13 AM, Yves Codet wrote:

Hello.

I couldn't try your package, both links seem to be broken but I found the 
documentation here:
http://projects.nihongoresources.com/downloadables/ucharclasses.pdf
According to what I read, if I want to use polyglossia to load hyphenation 
patterns, I can say:
\setTransitions{Devanagari}{\begin{sanskrit}}{\end{sanskrit}}
But how can I do if I want to use the \textsanskrit{one_word_in_Sanskrit} 
command?
   


You can disable ucharclass for a stretch of text with \uccoff and \uccon

- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] Auto Font and Language Package in XeTeX

[Michiel Kamermans]

I long had that on my todo list, but I'm yet to figure out a proper user
interface for it; one needs to take care of different font styles,
optical sizes etc. e.g. English ARABIC {\it english ARABIC} should work
and get the Arabic text assigned the proper italic font and so on.

The code at lua end is quit trivial, once the script->font mapping is
defined which is actually the tricky part.
   


Hmm... that sounds much more narrow than what you can do with XeTeX's 
intercharclass behaviour, and much more like just font-switching. I 
would imagine that something like what XeTeX offers makes it much easier 
to say "if arabic character from non arabic, RTL and font switch (and 
whatever else is requested by the user)". But perhaps LuaTeX wants to do 
these two things separately, which would of course be equally fine, just 
requiring a different approach in terms of packageness


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] Auto Font and Language Package in XeTeX

[Michiel Kamermans]

Alright, I finished the ucharclasses package at least to a functional 
degree, with the project page for it at 
http://projects.nihongoresources.com/xelatex/ucharclasses (it's been 
submitted to CTAN, so once it's in the listing it'll be nice and easy to 
grab).


If anyone has any improvement requests (either functionally or 
codewise), I'm all ears. Or eyes. whichever works best, really.


Incidentally, does anyone know whether there is a LuaTeX version of the 
XeTeXintercharclass behaviour that would let this package be rewritten 
for LuaTeX with minimal effort?


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Ellipsis

[Michiel Kamermans]

The PDF specification (which is now the ISO 32000 specification for 
portable documents) does allow for different on-screen and "when 
searched/copy-pasted" text, if you need this functionality (known as 
"replacement text", §14.9.4). It sounds like what you actually want is 
for the PDF reader to copy the text that is actually in the document, in 
which case Adobe's products behave correctly, and Evince does not. You 
can try to see what:


\usepackage{accsup}
\newcommand{\rellipse}{\BeginAccSupp{method=pdfstringdef,ActualText={…}}…\EndAccSupp{}}

does for you in Evince --  although last time I checked it didn't have a 
clue about how to deal with that feature, so it'll likely still violate 
the spec and copy whatever the authors decided to do instead =)


My recommendation: file a spec violation bug with the Evince team (sure, 
it's a 756 page document, but you're still supposed to either stick with 
it or not implement certain features, rather than inventing a new way to 
deal with something)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com



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Re: [XeTeX] Latex+Tamil

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi T.Sengottuvel,

Is this a ttf/otf font? I don't have ubuntu/debian, so I have no idea 
how to obtain this font. I googled for it a bit, but could not find a 
compiled .ttf or .otf version.


I used the following code with Code2000 instead, and that seems to work fine


\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Code2000}
\begin{document}
\section{தமிழ்}
அனைத்து மனிதர்களும் சுயமரியாதையையும் உரிமங்களையும் சமமாகவும் சுதந்திரமாகவும் 
பெற்றே பிறக்கிறார்கள்.

\end{document}


Don't use the "unicode" package with xelatex, do use the "fontspec" 
package, and only use the "xltxtra" package if you need the XeLaTeX logo


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com



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Re: [XeTeX] Unicode Arabic hyperlinks

[Michiel Kamermans]

On a sidenote, don't use \usepackage{fontspec,xltxtra,xunicode}, just 
use \usepackage{fontspec} - fontspec already loads xunicode, and as far 
as I can recall xlxtra only gives the XeLaTeX macro.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Auto Font and Language Package in XeTeX

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 12/12/2010 9:57 PM, Venkatesan. S.K. (TNQ) wrote:

If you look at current generation browsers, they assign fonts by 
default to all language scripts by their unicode plane.
Say, Greek="Palatino Linotype" etc. They also allow you to change the 
default font settings.


It would be a nice idea to build a default package in XeLaTeX that 
would use these fonts.


Alright, alright, I confess, I should just finish the damn 
"ucharclasses" package >_>


For the moment the dev version is here: 
http://projects.nihongoresources.com/downloadables/ucharclasses.tgz
documentation here: 
http://projects.nihongoresources.com/downloadables/ucharclasses.pdf


I still need to add in selective unicode block load options, and ideally 
follow up on Jonathan's suggestion from way back when, to add in script 
tags in addition to the current "blind" unicode blocks (although I 
suspect that would be more for a v2, since ambiguity is king when it 
comes to script).


I'm swamped with wrapping up my work before moving from Europe to 
Canada, Jan 1st, but I'll try to get it cleaned a little and CTANed over 
the weekend.


If anyone has a better package name for it before I sent it up to CTAN, 
feel free to pipe up and I'll change it to something more intuitive for 
users.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] installing mac font on linux

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Tim,

Yes, it's Font Book, the mac app. And you're right, the font files 
were 0 byte files.


With your help and Michiel's, I finally figured out that I had bought 
TrueType and needed OpenType. A quick trip to buy the opentype version 
of URW's Lucida Handwriting and my linux server is business. unzipped 
the file on the shared webserver into the user's local ~/.fonts 
directory and everything works.




Hmm, but TrueType fonts should not be a problem for XeTeX... 0-byte 
fonts, of course, would be =)


When a foundry sells both TrueType and OpenType versions of the same 
font, it just means the first is an OpenType font with TrueType outlines 
-- these started as the standard windows format, use quadratic bezier 
for curves, and allows either outline or 'other glyphs' as building 
blocks. The curves are not as precise as type2, but need less 
coordinates, too -- and the second is an OpenType font with type2 
outlines -- an update and rewrite of adobe's type1 format, which defines 
curves in terms of cubic bezier, meaning more data, but allows any 
series of outline instruction as subroutine by any number of glyphs, 
making the fonts drastically smaller.


Both are understood by XeTeX (with or without fontspec).

- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] installing mac font on linux

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 12/12/2010 9:56 AM, Tim Arnold wrote:
On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 12:26 PM, Peter Dyballa > wrote:



Am 12.12.2010 um 00:21 schrieb Tim Arnold:


I suppose there's no way to convert to TrueType?



There is: FontForge. (Usually your commercial font license does
not allow this...)

There are free handwriting fonts on the internet, it's also
possible that Lucida Handwriting exists in True- or OpenType format...

--
Greetings

 Pete

I can buy the font again, no problem, but it does work on my mac with 
xelatex so I'm just confused. I open the font in fontbook and export 
the font; tar/gzip the resulting directory and transfer to linux. 
 Maybe fontbook's export converts it from a xelatex-readable format to 
one thats not.


If no one has any other ideas, I'll buy the font again and hope for 
the best.


You may have to do this anyway, since you're not actually allowed to 
format-convert it.


Even though it's possible to use font forge to convert your font to 
being suitable for a modern engine (type 1 has been completely replaced 
by type 2 fonts, in OTF wrappers - adobe has updated all their fonts to 
type 2 at this point, and they invented type 1), you're not actually to 
do so.


Depending on how long ago you bought it, you might be able to convince 
the seller to give you a ttf/otf version, since type1 is mostly for use 
on legacy systems.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] supplying missing glyphs?

[Michiel Kamermans]

Andrea,



how can I upgrade the Times New Roman on my XP computer, which doesn't
have some of the characters that are in the Times New Roman on my Vista
laptop?
   


First, you'll have to get a license that grants you the use of that 
font, for the machine you want to use it on. Typically this means just 
finding a software bundle that comes with the font you want, but Times 
New Roman is only 30 euro, so it's probably cheapest to just buy a copy 
of it. The complete family is 175 euro, which is actually still cheaper 
than most software bundles that come with Times, although of course 
these will also come with loads of  other professional fonts that you 
can then use, so it might be more economical to buy a copy of Microsoft 
Windows or Office specifically for the rights that grants you with 
respects to using fonts.



- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com



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Re: [XeTeX] supplying missing glyphs?

[Michiel Kamermans]

Adam,

On 12/2/2010 4:20 PM, Adam McCollum wrote:

Dear list members,
I like the Hoefler Text font very much, but I see that it apparently 
doesn't have glyphs for a number of letters with diacritics, which I 
sometimes need for transliteration; please see the example text below. 
I've tried both unicode entry and the TeX way for entering these. Is 
there any way at all to "fake" these glyphs or otherwise supply them?


My thought would be to simply use a different font for those characters, 
by making use of the interchartok functionality of XeTeX. I do this for 
Chinese transliteration when I'm using Palatino Linotype as base font. 
It has virtually no extended Latin characters, so I rely on FreeSerif 
for the additional characters (and Caslon Pro for quotation, because 
Palatino's quotation symbols are dreadfully ugly).


The snippet of preamble relevant to this:

\XeTeXinterchartokenstate = 1

% set up the fonts
\newfontfamily{\mainlatinfont}{Palatino Linotype}
\newfontfamily{\extlatinfont}{FreeSerif}
\newfontfamily{\quotefont}{Adobe Caslon Pro}

% character classes (xetex  has 5 predefined classes: latin=0, 
cjk=1,2,3, boundary=255)

\newcommand{\extlatinclass}{\newcharclass}
\newcommand{\quoteclass}{\newcharclass}

% extended latin characters not found in Palatino
\XeTeXcharclass `\ǒ \extlatinclass
...
% quotation looks dreadful in Palatino
\XeTeXcharclass `\’ \quoteclass
\XeTeXcharclass `\‚ \quoteclass
\XeTeXcharclass `\“ \quoteclass
\XeTeXcharclass `\” \quoteclass

% transition to latin (including boundary)
\XeTeXinterchartoks \extlatinclass 0 = {\mainlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks \quoteclass 0 = {\mainlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks \quoteclass 255 = {\mainlatinfont}

% transitions to extended latin
\XeTeXinterchartoks 0 \extlatinclass = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks \quoteclass \extlatinclass = {\extlatinfont}

% transitions to quotation
\XeTeXinterchartoks 0 \quoteclass = {\quotefont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks \extlatinclass \quoteclass = {\quotefont}

- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com



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Re: [XeTeX] Two fontspec (v2.1b) problems

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Richard,

it's a known issue 
(https://github.com/wspr/fontspec/issues/closed#issue/79 and 
https://github.com/wspr/fontspec/issues/#issue/65), but we'll have to 
wait for either Will or Khaled to come up with an adequate fix for the 
next release.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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[XeTeX] fontspec infinitely recurses when there is no 'Latin' script in a font.

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi all,

it appears the latest fontspec has a bug when it comes to loading fonts 
that do not have an explicit OpenType "Latin" script entry; fontspec 
will look for this data, cannot find it, and then defaults the script to 
Latin before trying to access the font again. I can't find that entry, 
defaults to Latin, and tries again and again until TeX decides it's had 
enough of the recursion and kills itself.


An example of (one of the many) fonts this can be seen with is the GT 
2000-01 font, found at http://www.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/GT/downloads.html. 
According to font forge this font also has a bad format 6 lookup table, 
but that doesn't stop a single application from using it correctly 
anyway, and the error generated by fontspec running until TeX is out of 
memory seem to have nothing to do with cmap issues. Before updating TeX 
Live on the old fontspec this font was loaded correctly, although 
somewhat annoyingly I do not recall the exact fontspec version.


Was a fallback condition when no appropriate OpenType scripts are found 
accidentally removed from 2.0? =)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] fontspec location problems in MiKTeX

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 10/5/2010 3:15 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:

Make sure you don't have to different versions of "MS Mincho" font
accessible to XeTeX (possiply in different formats) as this is known to
cause this kind of issues.
   


Indeed. For some reason there's was TTC as well as a TTF for it... TTF 
deleted, compilation no longer broken. Thanks.


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] fontspec location problems in MiKTeX

[Michiel Kamermans]

I tried updating to MiKTeX 2.9 beta, to see if that solved the problem - 
everything now at least resolves to the right location, but fontspec is 
exhibiting a different problem. Take the following UTF-8 encoded .tex file:


\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{MS Mincho}
\begin{document}
This is text - にほんご
\end{document}

This compiles without errors, but gives the following as PDF output:

Sghr hr sdws , ➢➳々➈

That really doesn't look like the text it should be, all the Latin 
letters (including - but not including space!) are shifted one 
alphabetical position, and the Japanese has been completely destroyed 
(に, U+306B, dec 12395, utf-bin {1110.0011-10.01-10.101011}, has 
been turned into ➢, U+27A2, dec 10146, bin 
{1110.0010-10.00-10.100010}). The off-by-one for Latin seems an 
honest mistake, but it also looks like it's doing something creative to 
each byte in a set of UTF8 bytes, subtracting 1 in a creative way... but 
not for the last byte, where it's removing 9...


Anyway, the log gives the following information:

This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.2-0.9997.4 (MiKTeX 2.9 Beta 1) 
(preloaded format=xelatex 2010.10.5) 5 OCT 2010 22:52

entering extended mode
...
Document Class: article 2007/10/19 v1.4h Standard LaTeX document class
...
Package: fontspec 2010/09/29 v2.1b Advanced font selection for 
XeLaTeX/LuaLaTeX

...
Package: fontspec-patches 2010/09/29 v2.1b Advanced font selection for 
XeLaTeX/LuaLaTeX

...
("C:\Program Files (x86)\MiKTeX 2.9\tex\xelatex\xunicode\xunicode.sty"
File: xunicode.sty 2008/02/08 v0.91 provides access to latin accents and 
many other characters in Unicode lower plane)

LaTeX Info: Defining document command \fontspec
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'O{}m' on line 315.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \setmainfont
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'O{}m' on line 319.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \setsansfont
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'O{}m' on line 323.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \setmonofont
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'O{}m' on line 327.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \setmathrm
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'O{}m' on line 331.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \setboldmathrm
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'O{}m' on line 334.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \setmathsf
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'O{}m' on line 337.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \setmathtt
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'O{}m' on line 340.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \newfontfamily
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'mO{}m' on line 356.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \newfontface
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'mO{}m' on line 359.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \defaultfontfeatures
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'm' on line 362.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \addfontfeatures
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'm' on line 379.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \newfontfeature
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'mm' on line 386.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \newAATfeature
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. '' on line 395.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \newICUfeature
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'mmm' on line 404.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \aliasfontfeature
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'mm' on line 406.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \aliasfontfeatureoption
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'mmm' on line 409.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \newfontscript
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'mm' on line 414.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \newfontlanguage
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'mm' on line 432.
LaTeX Info: Defining document command \DeclareFontsExtensions
(LaTeX) with arg. spec. 'm' on line 449.

\...@fontspec_tmp_int=\count168
LaTeX Info: Redefining \itshape on input line 2016.
LaTeX Info: Redefining \slshape on input line 2020.
LaTeX Info: Redefining \scshape on input line 2024.
LaTeX Info: Redefining \upshape on input line 2028.

("C:\Program Files (x86)\MiKTeX 2.9\tex\latex\fontspec\fontspec.cfg"))
fontspec Info: Font MS Mincho does not contain any OpenType `Script' 
information.


\g_fontspec_family_MS Mincho_int=\count169
fontspec Info: Defining font family for 'MS Mincho' with options [].
fontspec Info: Defining shape 'normal' with NFSS specification:
(fontspec) <->"MS Mincho/ICU:"
fontspec Info: Could not resolve font MS Mincho/B (it probably doesn't 
exist).
fontspec Info: Could not resolve font MS Mincho/I (it probably doesn't 
exist).
fontspec Info: Could not resolve font MS Mincho/BI (it probably doesn't 
exist)

.
(c:\Users\Mike\Documents\ucharclasses\test.aux)
LaTeX Font Info: Checking defaults for OML/cmm/m/it on input line 4.
LaTeX Font Info: ... okay on input line 4.
LaTeX Font Info: Checking defaults for T1/cmr/m/n on input line 4.
LaTeX Font Info: ... okay on input line 4.
LaTeX Font Info: Checking defaults for OT1/cmr/m/n on input line 4.
LaTeX Font Info: ... okay on input line 4.
LaTeX Font Info: Checking defaults for OMS/cmsy/m/n on input line 4.
LaTeX Font Info: ... okay on input line 4.
LaTeX Font Info: Checking defaults for OMX/cmex/m/n on input 

[XeTeX] fontspec location problems in MiKTeX

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi,

just updated MiKTeX 2.8, and then tries to download it from repository 
location tex/xetex/fontspec - it doesn't see it there, and then tries to 
download it from an online repository. However, fontspec is now located 
in tex/latex/fontspec... is this a problem with MiKTeX or is it a 
problem with the entry on CTAN pointing to the wrong repository location 
somehow?


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Problem changing default fonts

[Michiel Kamermans]

Drébon,

in the world of typography it is a well known fact that Helvetica and 
clones lack small-caps, and many vehemently argue that this is right and 
proper, because "it is in a typeface family that shouldn't have 
small-caps". However, that means the trick is actually really simple: 
don't try to find a Helvetica clone with smallcaps, but simply find a 
different font that has a small-caps set that fits the visual style your 
publication uses, and then use that font instead of your main font when 
you need to run text in small-caps.


When one font doesn't offer what you need, use more fonts! (for 
instance, the combination of Palatino Linotype main text with FreeSerif 
punctuation looks far better than pure Palatino Linotype. Heresy! But it 
does anyway =)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com



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Re: [XeTeX] Tables

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 10/2/2010 3:29 PM, Mike Maxwell wrote:
Interesting.  We're producing grammars.  They're XML (if you want to 
mark structure, use XML!), and they get converted to XeLaTeX for 
typesetting (if you want to typeset, use LaTeX!).  One of the problems 
we've had is that of deciding whether tables are too large to fit on a 
page, and must therefore be printed with longtable instead of floating 
tables.  We've also had a few tables that are too wide, and need to be 
printed in landscape mode.


When we first faced this problem a couple years ago, I was surprised 
to find that there was no automatic way for LaTeX to detect the fact 
that a table was too long or wide to fit on a page.  Fortunately, it's 
possible to tag long or wide tables in XML (DocBook), so the 
appropriate LaTeX table package is used.  But that seems a poor way to 
do things; when somebody might want to print our grammar on a 
different size paper (A4, or maybe a book), they'll have to check each 
table to see whether it's appearing correctly.


I ran into the same problem with my Japanese grammar, where I wanted to 
set tables paragraph-aligned if they were narrow enough, centered on the 
page if the table would run off the page if still paragraph aligned, or 
generate a "this table is probably poorly thought up" if it didn't fit 
that way either, and using tabularx if the table fit on one page, and 
longtable if it didn't. I ended up writing to this list for help, and my 
working solution was actually rather dirty: I did it through 
preprocessing, so that the source-to-TeX conversion scripts actually 
look at the tables that are to be set, and pick the right tabling 
environment for them.


Tabling is still one of those things in TeX that severely lacks user 
friendliness. There's lots of choice how to set a specific table, but 
still no management package that makes the choice for you, based on 
table dimensions. Life without "linewrapping" when there is no explicit 
column width is an acceptable tradeoff when you want to "take control", 
but non-trivial tabling: damn, we still have a way to go =)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Problems finding/using fonts with both xdv2pdf and xdvipdfmx

[Michiel Kamermans]

Are these system wide fonts, accessible to all programs installed, or 
fonts in some dir that is supposed to be considered "special" by some 
program?


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/30/2010 8:33 AM, Axel Kielhorn wrote:


The main problem is that lshort is a latin1 document, thus it is almost 
impossible (yes, there is arabtex and CJK) to show examples.
   


well... we are on the xetex mailing list: save the source as utf-8 
unicode and then compile it with xelatex? =)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/27/2010 8:53 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:


You know, because Windows has the most consistent user interface an OS
ever had.

(From some one who is yet to see two "native" Windows applications that
behave the same)
   
 Yeah, yeah, look, my name isn't "Gates", but in windows the idea is, 
and virtually every applicaiton sticks to this, "if there's multiple 
windows, you get them INSIDE a master frame". I'm not going to argue 
that every single app developer went "yes windows design style guide, I 
will unquestioningly do what you say" but the vast majority of important 
applications obeys this simple unwritten rule.


I never said TeXWork was a bad program - it's great. But i annoys the 
hell out of me that it launches two applications when it says it's one. 
You close the right application, the left application doesn't close. 
Wtf? I thought I was running one program? So it's two applications... 
you close the left applicaiton, the right one does close. Again, wtf? So 
it IS one program? This is not good design for a windows application. It 
doesn't matter that some other people write good programs with bad UIs 
on windows, too. A worthwhile program uses the visual semantics that 
come with the OS it's made for. Stick both the windows side by side in a 
master frame when the code detects it's being compiled for Windows, make 
them visible and invisible via checkboxes in view/window->source and 
view/window->final or something, and presto, the entire gripe's gone. 
Now it's a cross platform editor that respects the user expectation of 
the vast majority of people who are going to be new to TeX.


Some people love TeXWork because it's a better alternative to everything 
they tried before, but that's because *they've tried everything else and 
didn't like it*. It's almost impossible to miss that means you're hardly 
new at TeX, but that you're a long time user who's sampled everything 
there is to sample over an extensive period of time and settled on 
TeXWorks because it lets you get the job done. That's great, if TeXWorks 
is where you ended up, awesome, it's a really good program, even on 
windows. It also breaks the idea of a single application that people 
that are new to TeX, and use windows, will be used to. When you're new 
to something, you don't want a program that behaves completely different 
from all the other big programs you use. You want to give someone new to 
TeX a familiar base first, so they don't tune out going "this is so 
radically different that I cannot get comfortable with it". Then, once 
you're familiar enough with it to realise that even a plain text editor 
on a command prompt works just fine (even if it's more work), looking at 
better editors that take away the UI familiarity is no longer 
objectionable. It's basically common sense. Familiarity + a little bit 
of new, then shift focus until the new is familiar, then drop the 
original hook you needed to convince people it was worth getting 
familiar with the new.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/27/2010 11:23 AM, Barry MacKichan wrote:
 Microsoft's recommendations on the UI of programs are only 
recommendations. If the task requires it, two windows are fine. This 
is what you would have if you previewed in Acrobat Reader anyway -- 
two apps but also two windows.


Yes, they are, and moving away from that recommendation for anything 
other than "things CANNOT be done unless we use two windows" is not 
understanding the user experience that windows users expect =)


Seeing the preview in acrobat viewer is seeing two different 
applications, with one window per application. This is fine, because 
that's how applications should behave in the world of a windows user. 
You shouldn't use *nix UI principles in windows in the same way that you 
don't use windows UI principles in MacOS, etc.


It's been a while, but my memory is that many of Adobe's apps, such as 
PhotoShop, have multiple windows, especially if you detach the 
palettes. If you recommend Unicode editors in xlshort, I think 
TeXWorks should be included.


These are still inside the master application window. You can move these 
around, but they don't go "outside" the application frame, such as for 
programs that have been complied for multiple operating systems without 
using OS specific look-and-feel management, such as Gimp or Inkscape.


TeXWork should be recommended. But I wouldn't recommend it as main TeX 
editor on windows just yet, because it refuses to behave like every 
other application I use on it. That makes it a "good alternative if the 
following editors aren't good enough for you :" and then a list of 
real "for windows" programs. I'll happily endorse it as primary editor 
on MacOS, though, because there the styling matches the standard 
application experience.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/27/2010 7:45 AM, Axel Kielhorn wrote:
Is there any editor with LaTeX support? How about TeXworks? I know 
that TeXniccenter does not support Unicode. (This is what lshort 
recommends) Another suggestion is LEd but it seems to be pre-Unicode 
as well.


I install notepad2 on every windows machine I use. In part because it 
doesn't require installing (download, run. no questions asked) and in 
part because it does everything a tex editor needs to do for me. That 
said: yes. TeXworks is decent, but violates the windows user experience 
of one window per application. It spawns two separate windows and that 
breaks the magic right there. On MacOS and *nix that's actually fine, 
but on windows if it's not all contained, it's a bad program.


However, there is Texmaker (http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/), which I 
used for quite a while. It understands unicode, and is set up to be 
UTF-8 by default for a few version numbers now. It also has a bucketload 
of separate build commands for doing different chains like latex + bable 
-> ps,  or xelatex+makeindex -> pdf, etc. It also has a quickbuild 
function where you can input your own command sequence for customised 
builds. It was rather useful until I discovered that I was way too busy 
looking at "what things would look like" instead of first just writing 
the entire document and then just tweaking minor things.


(Unless I need to typeset extensive math, for which I will still fire up 
Texmaker, I just use a plain text editor these days)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/26/2010 6:56 AM, Axel Kielhorn wrote:

I have to disagree, Vim and emacs (or should that be Emacs?) are available on 
Windows as well. (Maybe not used that often.)
   


While they're "available" for windows, windows users don't use them. 
Only people who transcend the OS label because they use multiple 
operating systems and have learned to like vim or emacs enough to want 
to use it on all their operating systems will also use these on windows.


Windows users use things like textpad (although because it still refuses 
to move to unicode, much less so than a few years ago), notepad++, 
notepad2, ultraedit, and all those "they started as windows programs so 
every windows user recommends them to their windows user friends".


Anything that's from the GNU stable can *very* safely be said to be a 
*nix thing, even though every single gnu program can be, and likely has 
already at this point been compiled for windows, too.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Michiel Kamermans]

This touches on a recent thread on a primer for XeLaTeX, which ended in 
http://wiki.xelatex.org/ (which I did not forget about to everyone who 
might suspect I have, conferences and moving house are currently robbing 
me of all my spare time)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] font licenses and embedding

[Michiel Kamermans]

font forge: font information, OS/2 table

- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] buggy hyphenation with fontspec-2.1

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/21/2010 12:45 PM, Pablo Rodríguez wrote:

Hi there,

checking whether a clash between fontspec and babel in LuaLaTeX 
(already reported at 
http://tug.org/mailman/htdig/luatex/2010-August/001895.html), I have 
just discovered new issues with this document:


\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage[german,spanish]{babel}


Not sure if it solves things, but don't use babel with xe(la)tex. Use 
polyglossia.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] If font under fontspec

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/21/2010 7:28 AM, Gareth Hughes wrote:
The Syriac font Estrangelo Edessa leaves noticeable white space before 
the letter ܓ when it is preceded by a non-joining letter. It seems 
this is a carry over from old metal type. Some people see it as a 
feature rather than a bug, but I wanted to provide a fairly smart user 
command for closing up that white space, and have written something 
with \XeTeXinterchartoks to do so. However, it is important that this 
kerning isn't applied when other Syriac fonts, which have no gap, are 
being set.


I hope that makes the situation a little more clear.


It does, although it also leads to a dangerous situation where you need 
more than just the font name: you also need to know the font version, 
too. If the type designers at some point (which could even be tomorrow) 
decide that this kerning quirk is actually unwanted, and produce a new 
version of the font with the same name, your "fix" will actually be 
detrimental. To my knowledge there is no way to ask fontspec for a font 
version number, but perhaps Will or Khaled know more about this.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com



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Re: [XeTeX] If font under fontspec

[Michiel Kamermans]

Thanks for this, Will. This is exactly the kind of thing I wanted. I
could use it to create a usable command that will 'fix' all subsequent
instances of the font. If it's designed as a command for an end user,
then the user can specify the exact set options.

I think that this might be easier than defining a new fontspec option to
fix a font, which would require redefining fontspec.
   


Purely from a production point of view: if you have a document for which 
it is important the right fonts are available, making sure the fonts are 
available to whomever needs to compile it might deserve consideration 
too. So that rather than trying to "fix" the source, you throw a compile 
error that the user does not have the prerequisite fonts to accurately 
generate the document that was intended to be generated.


Just thinking along the original TeX idea that "If it compiles, the 
result is the same for every system it successfully compiles on".



- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Separate fonts for Latin and Greek with fontspec?

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/17/2010 3:36 AM, BPJ wrote:
1. What about a command for defining arbitrary ranges?  This would be 
useful if one mucks around in different subblocks of the PUAs, 
particularly.  Something like: 
\setTransitionRange{}{}{}{} 





And why not. It's easy enough to define, I'll stick it in the next 
"version".



Too bad BTW that "Phonetics" isn't definable as an informal group!


Indeed, but that exposes the inherent problem of multiple languages 
using scripts that overlap with other languages... I don't know how hard 
it would be to assign letters to multiple classes, and then trigger 
transition rules only if the character is in one, but not both, classes 
involved in the transition. This would have to be done at the XeTeX 
level, though (Jonathan? =) and removing characters from specific 
classes might actually be too hard, simply warranting a 
\XeTeXremoveAllClasses followed by a new sequence of 
\XeTeXintercharclass assignments.


That said, I'd love to have characters bindable to multiple classes, 
with a top level command that allows or disallows that (similar to how 
interchartoks can be turned on/off). Of course it would still lead to 
interesting new situations where a sentence might be, say, Vietnamese 
but start with a normal Latin character. Which transition rule fires? 
Boundary-to-Latin or Boundary-to-Vietnamese?


Unicode went with "scripts", but that's basically equivalent to doing 
what Polyglossia does, where you indicate what the following stretch of 
text is. It works great, but you have to put in more commands, and the 
source becomes hard to read if you switch languages several times on a 
page, or within a paragraph.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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[XeTeX] \...@nameuse question

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi all,

I'm cleaning up my ucharclasses package, and wanted to move from 
ifthen/forloop to plain TeX. The Original code was:


\newcounter{iclass}
% general transition rule
\newcomman...@transition}[3]{\xetexinterchartoks #1 #2=#3}
%Use: \setUTransitions{when entering this block}{when leaving this 
block}

\newcommand{\setTransitionsFor}[3]{
\forloop{iclass}{\t...@classstart}{\value{iclass} < 
\...@nameuse{#1class}}{

\...@transition{\the\value{iclass}}{\@nameuse{#1Class}}{{#2}}
\...@transition{\@nameuse{#1Class}}{\the\value{iclass}}{{#3}}}
\addtocounter{iclass}{2}
\forloop{iclass}{\value{iclass}}{\value{iclass} < \t...@classend}{
\...@transition{\the\value{iclass}}{\@nameuse{#1Class}}{{#2}}
\...@transition{\@nameuse{#1Class}}{\the\value{iclass}}{{#3}}}
% and a binding for the transitions to and from boundary characters
\...@transition{255}{\@nameuse{#1Class}}{{#2}}
\...@transition{\@nameuse{#1Class}}{255}{{#3}}}

This works quite well, but relies on the forloop package. I replaced the 
\forloop commands with \loop\if\repeat:


\newcommand{\setTransitionsFor}[3]{
\loop\setcounter{iclass}{\t...@classstart}
\if\value{iclass}<\...@nameuse{#1class}
\...@transition{\the\value{iclass}}{\@nameuse{#1Class}}{{#2}}
\...@transition{\@nameuse{#1Class}}{\the\value{iclass}}{{#3}}
\addtocounter{iclass}{1}
\repeat
\addtocounter{iclass}{2}
\loop\setcounter{iclass}{\value{iclass}}
\if\value{iclass}<\t...@classend
\...@transition{\the\value{iclass}}{\@nameuse{#1Class}}{{#2}}
\...@transition{\@nameuse{#1Class}}{\the\value{iclass}}{{#3}}
\addtocounter{iclass}{1}
\repeat
% and a binding for the transitions to and from boundary characters
\...@transition{255}{\@nameuse{#1Class}}{{#2}}
\...@transition{\@nameuse{#1Class}}{255}{{#3}}}

However, running this through xelatex tells me:

! Missing number, treated as zero.

   \#1
l.263 ...\value{iclass}...@nameuse{#1}class}{{#2}}

?

What obvious protecting/immediate expansion/delayed expansion am I 
forgetting?


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] Separate fonts for Latin and Greek with fontspec?

[Michiel Kamermans]

David,

OK - major progress in that I have it all working for the single 
character α! But do I /really/ have to go through all 50 odd 
characters an assign them to my \greekclass individually? Or is there 
some sort of automation mechanism?


There are ways to automate the process, but I pretty much already wrote 
those, so I might as well put up the package I have sitting here... it's 
currently on 
projects.nihongoresources.com/downloadables/ucharclasses.tgz 
. 
The package supports setting fonts for Unicode "blocks" as well as 
informal groups, so you will probably want to simply bind your fonts of 
choice to informal "Latin" and "Cyrillic" groups:


\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\newfontfamily{\latin}{Times New Roman}
\newfontfamily{\cyrillic}{FreeSerif}
\setmainfont{Times New Roman}
\usepackage{ucharclasses}
\setTransitionsForLatin{\latin}{}
\setTransitionsForCJK{\cyrillic}{}
\begin{document}
This is some Engish text, Αυτό είναι ένα κείμενο στην ελληνική γλώσσα 
and then back to English without any explicit font markup.

\end{document}

The package may throw a warning about the fact that the 
"newXeTeXintercharclass" is already defined - I wrote it when that 
function was just landing in XeTeX, so the 
\RequirePackage{newxetexintercharclass} line in the ucharclasses.sty 
file can at this point safely be removed, and newxetexintercharclass.sty 
deleted.


I'll try to clean up the code at least so that it's 
current-XeTeX-compatible and put it on CTAN, then see if I can ditch the 
forloop package in favour of TeX looping, to speed things up a little 
bit. Although likely not by much - until XeTeX supports binding token 
sets to a class, rather than individual tokens, and does so using 
ranges, it's simply going to bind the entire Unicode range. Package 
loading options should help, so that if specific blocks/groups are 
specified, only those are loaded and the rest of Unicode is left 
untouched, but that'll come later.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Separate fonts for Latin and Greek with fontspec?

[Michiel Kamermans]

David, Gareth,


Sorry if I missed this in the manual, but is it possible to use fontspec
to map most unicode characters to one font, and some to another? In
particular, my intended use is that I prefer the Latin characters in
Adobe Garamond Pro to those in Myriad Pro, but the latter has Greek
support whilst the former does not, and they're similar enough that with
the odd Greek character (which is all I use!) they are pretty
stylistically compatible. Is it possible to set things up so that Greek
appears in Minion and Latin (and everything else) appears in Garamond?

(I only ask the question since something like this is possible in
unicode-math, IIRC.)
 

The fontwrap package can do this in PerlTeX. I still tend to use the
command sequences from Polyglossia when switching between scripts/languages.


A better route is to use xetex's interchartoks. I always had the idea to 
rewrite fontwrap as a fontspec-using xetex package instead, and the 
"ucharclasses" package is still sitting in my homedir waiting to 
befinished >_>


I did an explanation on how to do this in an older thread titled "How to 
use intercharclasses (was "Issue with CJK in pdfbuild")", 
http://tug.org/mailman/htdig/xetex/2009-November/014853.html



- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] PDF minor version

[Michiel Kamermans]

Heiko,


for debugging purposes I need a lower PDF minor version number for the PDF file 
generated by XeTeX.
   


Wait, do you just need a lower version number, or a PDF built to a lower 
version specification? Because the first is a job for GhostScript, not 
for the output driver. However, if you need a PDF built to 1.4 or 1.3 or 
even lower spec, then I'd agree it would be good to have a way to make 
XeTeX tell the output driver to generate a lower version style PDF.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] Newbie Question: Accessing Glyph

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/13/2010 8:46 AM, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
Much as I sympathise with, and understand, this Unicode-oriented 
approach, it seems to me that in real life, and in the absence of a 
universal keyboard which can conveniently and easily be used to enter 
the myriad human languages that Unicode contains, the "traditional" 
TeX way of entering diacritics (and characters beyond those found on 
an English keyboard) is actually by far the most useful and usable.  
If XeTeX does not currently have a macro set which allows all such 
characters to be conveniently entered mnemonically (and \char "0123 
doesn't count as mnemonic !), then I do think that there is a clear 
case for its creation.


I can't speak for others, but if I need a rare character, I fire up 
BabelMap, look for the thing by name, and then insert it. Until a second 
ago, for instance, I had no idea what the unicode value for a lower case 
o with macron (ō) was (turns out it's U+014D), and I won't have to 
remember it either because every time I need it I'll just insert it into 
my text, to ensure it stays readable, even as TeX source.


Of course, if you use a specific character a lot you can bind it to a 
macro like \thatcharIconstantlyneed (but then named sensibly, of course) 
and use it that way, so I suppose I should have said "try to avoid using 
\char unless it's for a character that you use frequently and can't 
input in a simple manner, like via an "insert symbol" in your editor".


My personal prefernce is to try to keep the text as human readable as 
possible. Because putting in a macro for a letter makes the source 
harder to read ("jōhō" is human readable, "j{\omacron}h{\omacron}" is 
not, for instance; or using "deʃign" instead of "de{\esch}ign") the 
small effort for infrequent characters usually pays off when revisiting 
a text. But it does require more discipline to stick with that mode of 
writing!


(Of course this does not apply to typesetting, say, medieval text that 
requires both regular and long s in specific places. Then one would 
reach for a package that lets you type normally and picks the right 
version of s, ſ or ʃ for you)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] warning from polyglossia

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/13/2010 7:47 AM, Fr. Michael Gilmary wrote:


OK --- so we don't need to invent a new language!


I'm fairly certain Philip was joking, given that the date of the 
directive was well in the future, and the EU can't legally force 
programs that aren't for exclusively European use to follow its 
directives =)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] Newbie Question: Accessing Glyph

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Marc,


I'm trying to use an opentype "Adobe Garamond Premier Pro"
and it works mostly fine, except that there are some problems:
  o I'd like to know how to access certain glyphs in the font files. For 
example, the euro symbol, the long es, and ornamental symbols.
   


When switching from LaTeX to XeLaTeX, the first thing to realise is that 
in XeLaTeX, you write your text in unicode, relying on the unicode way 
of representing characters and character sequences. As such, the best 
choice is to not "access glyphs" but to just put them directly in your 
document: just use €, ſ, etc.


If you absolutely must access them through artificial means, you can use 
\char:


\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Code2000}
\begin{document}
% "latin small letter long S"
\char"017F
\end{document}

but you shouldn't have to resort to this.


  o I've noticed that certain diacritics don't work such as tie-after accent 
(\t{oo}) and bar-under accent (\b{o}). I'd appreciate it if somebody could 
provide some pointers which explain how to define proper commands for 
individual glyphs and how to fix the diacritics.
   
Diacritics are handled by the unicode-ness, too. You just type the text 
that you want, relying on the unicode sequencing in your text editor to 
get things right, and then you run xelatex with your file. You should 
emphatically NOT use any of the LaTeX commands for adding diacritics.



As a related issue (I don't know what's in the font files), I'd appreciate it 
if somebody could recommend a nice unix tool that allows me to view the font 
tables? (I've googled
around a bit but I failed to find anything nice.)
   


Install Fontforge (should be in every major *nix's package list), use it 
to open the desired font, and proceed to examine the hell out of it =)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] Fontspec: Historic not Historical Ligatures?

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/12/2010 6:47 AM, Khaled Hosny wrote:

I know my English is severely suffering, but "historic ligatures" don't
sound like a proper phrase, so I'm not sure what was the motivate behind
the change.
   


It's a subtle difference, "historical" simple referring to "something 
from the past", while "historic" implies some kind of historical 
importance. Although I don't remember learning about any historic 
ligatures in history class, pivotal in forming our shared past =)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation initiative - a website

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi David,

Here's one more suggestion:  Would it be useful to designate some 
parts of the text as less important for beginners?  For instance, some 
people might want to know more about the history of TeX and the 
relations among the various versions, while others might get impatient 
and just want to see how to start their first document.  One short 
paragraph would provide the essentials and another longer one could 
give more background.  Right now we could just mark the less important 
stuff with a phrase like ; later that could be handled 
typographically (smaller size, indented, special symbol, whatever).


I can do you one better. I can make a syntax plugin that turns 
\beginner, \intermediate and \advanced into picture substitutions on the 
website. Although I'll do that after I make this OTF parser behave... 
svg absolute coordinate path vector looks fine, relative path vectors 
are going wrong all over the place. It's either a 5 minute fix, or hours 
of fun for the whole family


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation initiative - a website

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Will,

good points, I added them as a "policy" bit on the wiki page. Good to 
hear xltxtra has become obsolete, that's one less thing that needs to be 
explained =)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation initiative - a website

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi all,

I've put up a wiki with a highly tentative structure on 
http://wiki.xelatex.org/doku.php - sadly xetex.org is taken by some 
domain hiking service so there's no obvious xetex.org counterpart to be 
had...


Anyway, it's the normal wiki deal, although you need to register an 
account to edit (just to prevent the occasional defacing that random 
passersby tend to enjoy doing to open wikis). I suggest we do keep 
functional discussions on the list, because there is great value in 
being able to trawl through it on the xetex mailing list archive.


If anyone has any plugins they think are vital to streamlining the 
process of a concerted effort to document as much as we can, please let 
me know.


Also, if you're a package author or maintainer for a xelatex package 
that has to be covered, I recommend turning the mention of your package 
on the main page into a link ('fontspec' -> '[packages:fontspec]', for 
instance) so that you have a hook to a page where you can put all the 
information you think should be in an overarching Xe(La)TeX user manual 
and reference guide.


Thanks to everyone who's been participating in the thread so far, and 
let's hope we can keep up the effort!


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi philipp,

I don't use ConTeXt myself that much, largely because of the lack of 
documentation and my own laziness. Unfortunately many of the documents 
are outdated and cover the "old" ConTeXt Mk II instead of Mk IV. Also 
there is peer pressure: Someone willing to use ConTeXt is largely on 
his/her own, without support from colleagues, because LaTeX is still 
ubiquitous. After all, LaTeX is good enough for most people, and the 
rest usually doesn't have the time to become acquainted with a very 
different systems.


Thanks, you just validated this documentation initiative =D

- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Philipp,

and I personally jumped straight into xelatex because the internet told me it 
was the only unicode-aware flavour of TeX
 

That is not correct, LuaTeX is Unicode-based as well.
   


Sure, but LuaTeX wasn't around five years ago. To make matters worse, it 
only publically available with the release of TeX Live 2010, and even 
then the LuaTeX team gives the projected "stable" date as sometime 2012. 
To make matters worse, the website quite literally says "you can use it, 
but you're on your own", meaning that it's not recommendable as a TeX 
flavour someone new to the process should start with. It just makes it a 
cool project to contribute to while it marches on towards version 1, and 
I'm sure we're all very much looking forward to it being stably done, 
but in the mean time it's a project in development. Once it's no longer 
a "you're on your own" version, the choice between Xe(La)TeX and LuaTeX 
will become a real choice.



It's not at all "ridiculously easy."  There is still no stable OpenType math or 
microtypography on XeTeX.
   


Of course, and I would urge you to suggest what alternatives people have 
- these deserve mention in the documentation as alternatives to 
Xe(La)TeX for people to whom those features are dealbreakers.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/10/2010 9:18 AM, Tobias Schoel wrote:

Hello everybody,

some remarks from a happily xelatex-using maths and physics teacher 
who has just finished university:


When someone arrives at xelatex he has usually gone some way through 
the tex/latex world already. (Mostly latex, I think.) You can safely 
suppose that he has read and used:

 - lshort
 - one latex book (companion, texbook, ...)
 - some further tutorials and package documentations he needed


Assumptions are bad science =)

I can't say I ever actually read lshort, for instance, and I personally 
jumped straight into xelatex because the internet told me it was the 
only unicode-aware flavour of TeX, making the choice ridiculously easy. 
The only thing I used at the time to "get up to speed" as it were was 
the wikibook on latex. and that stopped being useful relatively quickly 
when I discovered big or long tables in latex were ridiculous to typeset 
nicely.


If we end up writing good enough documentation, someone doesn't have to 
arrive to xelatex "from" another flavour - they'll have been told to use 
xelatex by their friends and colleagues already, so writing it now with 
an eye to the future would be good policy.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans


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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi John,

fair point, plain XeTeX should not be left out.

- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/9/2010 9:09 PM, Wilfred van Rooijen wrote:

OK, how about the following table of contents for a xelatex companion:

- all material is based on the use of xelatex in combination with freely 
available high quality fonts, such as Latin Modern and TeX Gyre. The added 
finesses of Zapfino accessible through xelatex are beyond our scope (to give an 
example)
   


While something like Zapfino is too rare to require full covering, the 
concent of applying opentype features is not. we should at the very 
least cover the whole "using opentype features", for which a swashes 
example will be good. I don't think it should actually be beyond the 
scope, since one of major reasons you'd want to use xelatex (other than 
that luatex isn't officially done or supported yet) is because you can 
finally exploit all the features in those professional fonts you bought, 
without having to use something like InDesign, or Office 2010 in 
developer mode (manipulating the actual document code to add code to use 
more than one style selector). It's a fair bet that this will matter to 
more people than are currently using xelatex. If the manual covers it, 
it'll let people who need these things evaluate whether or not xelatex 
is right for them. Instead of never hearing about it =)



- All material focuses on the use of the memoir class, because it seems that 
most of the material in the latex companion is supported by memoir
   


Honestly, I strongly disagree. Memoir is not "latex" or "xelatex" so 
much as just a really elaborate documentclass on its own, and comes with 
its own, fantastically detailed, huge manual. It's from one of the few 
authors who did actually take the time to document every little thing in 
excruciating detail. I would recommend a section is devoted to "If 
you're looking for an all encompassing document class, let's look at 
memoir, but it's so immense that covering all of it is well beyond the 
scope of this book - here's what you need to know for basic use, but we 
strongly recommend you read its manual instead to get the most out of it".


We shouldn't focus on explaning things from a memoir-user perspective, 
and annoy everyone who doesn't exactually want to use it (I found it 
conflicted with some things I needed, and ended up deciding on going 
with 'book', for instance). Explaining some of the more basic packages 
that memoir offers functionality of --geometry, crop, fancyhdr, for 
instance -- will be more important I think. I'm not saying that we 
shouldn't emphasise how cool memoir is, and that you should use it if 
given half the chance, but it's far from a defacto document type. 
Answering questions that pop up regularly on the newsgroups and lists 
(how do I set my margins? how do I center my B5 content on a US-letter 
sized page? how do I put different things in my page headers?) should be 
the first goal, and then we can always say "of course, if you can also 
solve these issues by using memoir, but be prepared to read a 500 page 
manual before posting questions about it".



- Other classes to be at least mentioned are book and article (koma-script?)
   


I would say book and article are "essential" to everyone who's writing a 
small document, and let's be honest, someone who's starting with TeX 
isn't immediately going to write a huge document. Not sure about 
koma-script, since it seems to be mostly either book/article or memoir 
in many places on the web. We can always say "and if you're looking for 
more document classes, try CTAN. Here's a few you might want to check 
out: koma-script, ..., ..."


As for the structuring, a suggested further specification:

Preamble:

. Introduction
. History of tex & friends
. The difference between latex and xelatex (compiling straight to pdf 
makes sense to new users, . but not to people who still think 
tex->dvi->ps, for instance)

. Where to get help

Part 1: basic use (some overlap with standard latex works cannot and 
should not be avoided)


. Structure of a basic latex document for xelatex
. - always use UTF-8... in fact, make that the first sentence?
. - always use xltxtra
. - concept of preamble/document separation, instructions vs. comments
. - sectioning a document
. Basic built-in formatting
. - environments
. - linebreaks, hyphenation, text styling (bold/italic, strong/emphasized)
. - basic tables (tabular) and item list ("numerical"/"itemize")
. Basic not-built-in formatting tools and page layout
. - tocloft (should arguably come as first package)
. - geometry (for manual page sizing)
. - crop (serioulsy, I know I wish this had been covered in standard 
tutorials when I started)
. - fancyhdr (it's both basic if just used, and not so basic when marks 
have to be explained. Which they do, so perhaps a simple fancyhdr 
explanation, and a more detaile explanation of fiddling with marks later)

. Elaborate formatting
. - memoir
. Character coding, unicode, OTF fonts, xelatex
. - always use UTF-8... again
. - opentype features
. - fontsp

Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Philip,

But it couldn't, because when LaTeX first became mainstream (LaTeX 
2.09), there was no such series of books, there was (just) Leslie 
Lamport's /LATEX: a Document Preparation System : User's Guide and 
Reference Manual/, which even today sells for GBP 20-00 on Amazon.  So 
someone had to write "The Companions", and if you consider the effort 
involved in doing that, as well as the effort involved in developing 
LaTeX2e from LaTeX 2.09, I think you will agree that the investment in 
time must have been very considerable.  So it seems to me that it is 
not unreasonable for those who wrote the Companions to seek to recoup 
some of the writing and development costs by charging a reasonable sum 
for copies.  Does that seem unreasonable to you ?


For back when LaTeX was new and relatively unknown, and information 
about it sparse? no, that approach was perfectly reasonable. However, 
that was also almost twenty years ago. When I started using LaTeX, maybe 
four or five years ago, I did so because it was mainstream, being the 
defacto formatting language for scientific publications, for instance. 
So, back then, perfectly reasonable. If the exercise were repeated 
today, with so much information and so much (and so easily achieved) 
international cooperation? I'd say unacceptably unreasonable =)


But let's leave this particular discussion for what it is (or let's take 
it off-list, at least) so that the thread can focus on discussing a 
concerted documentation effort of Xe(La)TeX without sidetracking.


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Michel,


Hello, as stated at the very beginning and the preface of the XeTeX Companion, I consider 
myself merely as a "maintainer" of that document. It was always my intention to 
make and keep this document freely available to all, at the same time inviting all those 
who would like to contribute to add material where they like.
   


True, apologies for not mentioning that in my own posts.


At the moment the source uses some technically complex setup, due to history 
(accumulation of definitions and implementation hacks we used for the various 
editions of the three companions). The first thing perhaps would be to sanitize 
the markup by using, e.g., the memoir class (or whatever) so that everybody 
would have a common framework.

I am open to any proposal the community might consider useful.
   


Hmm, for collaborative document writing I'm partial to dokuwiki, but 
that's mostly because I've found it quite useful myself since it stores 
all article text in flat .txt files instead of sticking it in some 
database, making it easy to use as data repository in a document 
production chain. What's the setup you're using?


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Philip,

I think you will find that the charge for the Companions (rather like 
the charge for the TeXbook itself) goes to offset the expenses of 
those developing LaTeX (resp. TeX) rather than lining anyone' pocket ...


I never claimed it lined anyone's pockets, or that charging money for it 
is terrible, but it's an authorative work that should have existed as 
"official" documentation for LaTeX in the first place, like any good 
product comes with a good manual. Just having a noble cause for the 
proceeds is not, on its own, enough to sell something. The typical 
person will justify paying for a book based on how useful the book is, 
and that's the tricky part: if you've never touched TeX before, there is 
no way for you to appreciate how hard the work was that others put in 
developing and doucmenting it. It's just another technology. You just 
see a loose collection of packages and an engine that people claim are 
free and fantastic, and "not as hard as people make it sound", but then 
you discover that as you're trying to use it, it actually IS that hard, 
and you need a $50 book just to explain what a normal person expects is 
already explained in the help files. Which don't exist =)


Of course, you can spend days trawling the internet for free snippets 
that explain the specific problem you're having, and you can post on a 
newsgroup or a mailing list and get help that way, but that shouldn't 
have to be a first recourse, but more of a fallback approach when the 
documentation doesn't cover what you want to do. And, when you're new to 
LaTeX, anything you're trying to do should be in the documentation, 
because you're not likely to do something a large number of people 
didn't try to do before you.


Personally, I'm a big fan of the "free digital form and for-monies book 
form" idea that Bruce Eckel more popular -- I stick to that model myself 
for my own book, too -- where, if the material is useful, people buy the 
book anyway because it's a good book to have. Of course if others don't 
subscribe to that philosophy, no problem. But free digital documentation 
makes everyone's lives easier I think =)


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/7/2010 9:23 PM, Wilfred van Rooijen wrote:

It seems that there have been no replies to the list about Michiel's proposal to make a 
combined xe(la)tex reference manual and user manual. Personally I would be willing to 
contribute, but I am not an expert on xetex, rather a casual user with perhaps 
"advanced" experience of using latex for several types of (scientific) 
publications. Michiel, what exactly so you have in mind? A Xe(La)TeX Companion, i.e. 
similar to the latex companion but based on xelatex, and then expanded to include more 
references to xetex specific commands and programming?

I can see something like this: a user manual focusing on xelatex, typesetting 
of scientific works, bibtex and the associated front ends, hyperref etc, beamer 
to make presentations, TikZ (2D and 3D) to make figures, in short, something 
like a latex companion but modernized and expanded to include a reference 
manual.
   


That was my idea. I was considering starting with the "XeTeX companion" 
[1] that Michel Goossens collaboratively started in 1996, and extending 
it/updating it to cover the basic topic of TeX, the specific topic of 
the XeTeX flavour, and all commonly used packages that end up being 
discussed on this list again and again (fontspec, polyglossia, hyperref, 
xeCJK, bidi, etc), as well as a section on writing your own commands and 
package, also highlighting common basic TeX commands you should at least 
have seen if you want to have any hope of writing a decent XeTeX command 
yourself, like the "Plain TeX Quick Reference" [2], but then adapted to 
also contain the XeTeX specific commands that let one write a generally 
useful macro. A section on pdf-related commands would also be essential, 
I think, especially for those who need to generate production PDF 
(several people in the past year asked questions falling under that topic).


Of course, hijacking Michel's work wouldn't be very nice, but if he 
doesn't mind a fresh batch of document contributions then we're already 
well on our way to having an up to date document that we can point to 
and say "this should be able to get you from never having used (La)TeX 
to general purpose Xe(La)TeX use".


(And ideally keeping it free, even if it ends up available in book form. 
I personally found that the one truly annoying thing about the LaTeX 
companion - I don't mind paying for a reference work after it turns out 
it is the reference work I need, but what's the point of a free 
typesetting engine when the documentation costs a non-trivial amount of 
money? It always seemed to me the one real reason LaTeX is considered so 
inaccessible to the general public)


- Mike

[1] http://xml.web.cern.ch/XML/lgc2/xetexmain.pdf
[1] http://infohost.nmt.edu/tcc/help/pubs/texcrib.pdf


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Re: [XeTeX] command line options for xelatex?

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Alan,

Ahh, thanks.  I didn't try that.  It would be useful, however, to have 
a man page, since that's the normal way such information is found, I 
think.


Usually you resort to a man page when the --help readout doesn't 
actually tell you anything (like only listing the possible flags without 
an explanation of what they do).


But if --help is insufficient, xetex can be texdoc-ed with "texdoc 
xetex". Rather than a man page, it relies on the texdoc parser to 
autogenerate its documentation on request (although on my MiKTeX 2.8 
system that gives me an html file that basically contains only the same 
information as --help, others on a presumably slightly modern install 
report it generating the same docs as found on 
http://tug.ctan.org/pkg/xetexref)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] XeTex and Japanese kunten and warichū

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 9/4/2010 8:14 PM, Tak Yato (ZR) wrote:
> The author of sfkanbun package, Shinsaku Fujita, shows some samples
> of kunten typesetting on his web site.
> http://homepage3.nifty.com/xymtex/fujitas/kanbun/kanbunex.html
> You can view more samples by clicking the links to JPG images.
>   

Much like the gehzu package, why is this not on CTAN... it certainly
doesn't help people not reinventing the wheel...

- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] XeTex and Japanese kunten and warichū

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Jiang,


CJKfntef works with XeCJK.


I was hoping to get underdotting to work without having to load xeCJK, 
in the same way that ruby works as its own package... xeCJK hijacks the 
to/from CJK interchar rules, so you can no longer issue normal fontspec 
instructions. When the parser goes from the closing } of the fontspec 
instruction to the following CJK character, xeCJK's interchar rules 
insert xeCJK's own fontspec command. While this is useful if you want to 
work exclusively with xeCJK for your CJK needs, it's maddeningly 
frustrating if you in fact don't, but are forced to rely on it in order 
to get some styling effect applied.


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] XeTex and Japanese kunten and warichū

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Clemente et all,

it took a bit of stabbing, but this should hold you over for the 
warichuu with preservation of furigana in vertical mode. However, this 
still leaves the matter of kunten... I tried to use the CJK and CJKfntef 
packages, which is supposed to give the \CJKunderdot, \CJKunderline, and 
\CJKunderwave commands, but they don't... do anything. Which is a bit 
confusing, and mostly useless as a result.


So, half the problem tackled, anyone any ideas on the second half?

- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com




test.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document


test.tex
Description: TeX document


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Re: [XeTeX] XeTex and Japanese kunten and warichū

[Michiel Kamermans]

For vertical text and warichu, you can use the gezhu [1] package by
Yin Dian. I'm not sure about kunten though.

- Jiang

[1]http://code.google.com/p/gezhu/
   


Hmm, interesting. Sadly, gezhu doesn't behave that well for me, giving 
oddly sized text in the 'warichuu'/gezhu sections. Perhaps Werner 
Lemberg might be interested in adding similar functionality to the CJK 
package. After all, if it's a CJKV language feature it shouldn't have to 
require a package that isn't on CTAN  (or seemingly even maintained 
since 2007)


Perhaps the ruby macros could be updated to deal with complex ruby at 
the same time (to support both upper and lower guide text).


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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[XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi all,

based on some of the talks in the documentation thread, I was wondering 
if I could suggest a documentation initiative. Michel Goosens had a stab 
at chronicling XeTex it in 1996 with his "The XeTeX Companion" (which 
has seen a few updates since, the last in January 2010) and Apostolos 
Syropoulos was working on his own "The Annotatoed XeTeX Reference 
Manual", with the last update in 2007 (if the generation date in the pdf 
file is correct, Apostolos! =)


Would there be animo for combining both efforts to form a reference + 
user guide work, or in reviving both as parallel but separate documents, 
brought back up to date to reflect everything we can make Jonathan spill 
about XeTeX and everything others have made XeTeX do that can be 
considered something "people will do during their life with XeTeX" 
(including common uses of common packages for which reading an entire 
package manual -- like memoir's -- will be overkill)?


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation? (from "Checking if a font exists")

[Michiel Kamermans]

Heiko,


\XeTeXpdffile  [page ] [crop|media|bleed|trim|art]
   [scaled|xscaled|yscaled
   |width|height
   |rotated]*

The first two options are specific for PDF files (\XeTeXpdffile),
thus the syntax of \XeTeXpicfile is

\XeTeXpicfile
   [scaled|xscaled|yscaled
   |width|height
   |rotated]*
   


Are you sure scale takes  and not ? Scaling in integer 
steps sounds like it might be a problem.


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation? (from "Checking if a font exists")

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Wilfred,

I know the missing-manual problem all too well (I work at a research lab)...

I agree that it would be better if a developer (or developing team) 
releases a proper manual. But indeed the open source model is such 
that __anybody__ can write a manual if you really want to.




And I fully appreciate that. But the question was *are* there such 
manuals that anyone knows of. Responses in the sympathy of "good luck 
finding one" or "write your own!" is equally frustratingly often 
encountered, and it's just not useful. After hearing it a million times, 
it just makes you want to stab someone in the face for not just adding a 
courtesy "I don't know of one, although someone else on the list/in the 
group/at the conference might" =)


The problem with "writing your own" is that typically the reason you 
need a manual is because you don't know what the thing can do, and 
unless someone intimately familiar with it can help you write that 
manual, it's not going to be a manual at all. It's going to be a "my 
experience with this program, and most of it was just bumbling around so 
what I'm telling you cannot even be interpreted as the correct way to do 
things". Not a fan of those =D


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation? (from "Checking if a font exists")

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Khaled,

"texdoc xetex" only generates a man page style html file for the xetex 
command line program when I run it. I was more enquiring about the 
existence of  normal application documentation. I.e., which commands are 
supported by XeTeX, how do you do certain things in XeTeX, which things 
that you might be used to doing from TeX/LaTeX *shouldn't* you do in 
XeTeX, etc.


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation? (from "Checking if a font exists")

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 8/30/2010 6:23 AM, Avi Wollman wrote:
you know what happens when you ask questions like the in the opensouce 
community ?
you get answers like: When you finish making one please send us all a 
copy.


Yeah, thanks... slightly counter-productive answer, potentially 
preventing others from adding a useful answer to the question by 
considering it wrapped up with a witty remark. This is not a simple open 
source project, it's a project centered around a typesetting engine. If 
there's no documentation for a documentation system, all hope is already 
lost ;)


I found /the XeTeX Companion: TeX meets Opentype and Unicode/, currently 
under construction by Michel Goossens [1], but XeTeX has been around 
since 2004. I find it hard to believe that his work is the first 
atttempt at documenting XeTeX, so I'm going to go with not believing it 
and asking the key players in XeTeX development where documentation can 
be found.


- Mike

[1] http://xml.web.cern.ch/XML/lgc2/xetexmain.pdf


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[XeTeX] XeTeX documentation? (from "Checking if a font exists")

[Michiel Kamermans]

Jonathan,

I'm surprised no-one has suggested the straightforward, pure-xetex 
approach: something along these lines (untested).

[snip]


Nice... I didn't know there was a \nullfont command for checking against.

That does bring up a question though: is there a comprehensive pdf 
document or web page that describes the various commands available in 
XeTeX to make life easier? TeX has the TeX book and TeX by Topic, LaTeX 
has fairly large number of publications dedicated to it, where might one 
find something similar for XeTeX? (and if possible, can it be linked to 
from the SIL XeTeX page so it's easy to find?)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Checking if a font exists

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Alan,

Is there a way to check whether a font is present in a user's system?  
I need to generate a document with Myriad Pro if it exists, Arial 
otherwise, and if neither, exit with an error.


Myriad Pro is nothing like Arial, though... but just to make your life 
worse: thought about version numbers? There are many versions of Myriad 
Pro, and many versions of Arial. How do you know which version numbers 
are permissible?


But let's step back for a moment because there's a fundamental problem 
with your question: if you're using TeX, you're implicitly saying you 
care deeply about the typesetting of your document, which includes being 
particular about which stretches of text use what font. Not just "which 
various fonts look good for this text", but "which font is the one I 
intend to use for this bit of my document". Rather than testing for 
several fonts on a user's machine, and picking "the best match", like if 
the content were styled via (X)HTML+CSS, with a font rule that specifies 
various fonts with fallbals, part of the power of TeX is the fact that 
it will always look the same on any machine it's compiled on, provided 
the dependencies are met. So, either your document will look the same no 
matter what machine it's compiled on, or it doesn't compile. The idea 
that it will compile with Myriad Pro on one machine, and Arial on 
another, basically violates the very idea of TeX.


The better way to solve whatever problem you're having that made you 
wonder how to detect certain fonts is to simply supply those fonts along 
with your .tex source. If other people need to compile your source, 
simply ensure that they have everything they need to compile it?


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com



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Re: [XeTeX] embedding fonts

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 8/28/2010 7:03 AM, hh-bra...@bol.com.br wrote:

It is the wish of the publisher that pdf-documents have their fonts embedded and
not only as a subset. This of course shows that they do not understand TeX 
(where a small
error does only need one extra run probably).
   


The publisher can wish all they like, but for the final print run you 
don't need the full font, that's only required if the PDFs should be 
editable, in which case one has to question the value of TeX in that 
workflow. The power of TeX is that the source is easily changed to 
reflected necessary changes and recompiled. Doing the change in the PDF 
instead means the source material is now no longer in line with the 
publisher's corrections. Who now has the "real" content?


Discuss this with your publisher.

In addition, many fonts do not allow full embedding. Discuss this with 
your publisher too.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] xe(la)tex to epub?

[Michiel Kamermans]

Khaled, Ross,


As I wrote above, if it is about the structural formating, then it does
not worth the trouble, it can be achieved with almost every tool and
document format out there (even office suits can build structured
documents). It is visual, the precise output, where TeX excels which is
totally lost during such conversions.

This can be useful, however, if one have existing TeX material that need
to be processed to other output format, though one can still argue that
converting it ones to some sort of XML is much better long term plan.

Don't get me wrong, I like TeX syntax and find it more easier to author
with than many other markups, but I accept that it does not fit every
need.
   


I write textbooks. I write these in TeX, because that allows me to 
easily modify very large, structured documents. I have used DocBook in 
the past, and the best way I can summarise it, is "easy to write 
initially, migraine inducingly insane to update or revise". It is really 
easy to mark up a document as DocBook, and it is then very hard to 
modify the structure without getting so frustrated with the utterly 
inadequate DocBook editors on the market that you resort to completely 
wiping the document's markup, moving everything around, and then 
reapplying all the markup.


TeX, on the other hand, is "steep learning curve for the initial 
document, child's play to revise". It's why I gave up DocBook in favour 
of TeX. So that's my situation. My texts are in TeX, and we take it from 
there: I would like to generate not just pdf, but also epub from these 
sources, without having to write a completely different book using a 
completely different toolchain that gives me two completely different 
documents with the same words in it... I can't even being to imagine the 
potential for errors and inconsistencies that introduces =)


It's not really about a favourite "synax", it's about having a tool that 
already produces a device independent document format that then gets 
converted to a specific device readable format. Can that independent 
format also be converted to epub? If it can't, that unfortunate, and 
perhaps someone will end up writing a dvi to epub driver (limited in its 
functionality by what epub offers for document layout). If it can, then 
that's great and I'd like to start using it as soon as possible.


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] xe(la)tex to epub?

[Michiel Kamermans]

Khaled,


AFAIK, epup is just a subset of xhtml with a subset of css2, so IMO not a kind 
of output format that is very well suited for TeX (well, I hardly consider html 
an output format at all, the output is what the browser renders out of it).
   


True, but CSS uses a box model too, so it should be possible to create 
an "initial view" document that -- provided the render engine is 
properly compliant -- essentially looks the same as a generated pdf 
(barring special pdf commands, of course). Given the pretty rigid 
description of how CSS should be rendered by the w3c documentation for 
it, any x(ht)ml+css document is a proper format (be that for print or 
screen. note that there are a number of stand-alone css render engines 
which don't rely on browsers, but are meant for integration into reader 
applications devices, for instance). The difference between something 
like epub and pdf is that the layout in the first is mutable. For 
digital readers, with many different viewport sizes and aspects, that's 
highly desirable. For print media the epub format is, of course, 
nonsense. Hence the desire for parallel format generation.


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] xe(la)tex to epub?

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Rob,


I'm not sure if there is a driver which works directly with xelatex, but you 
might want to take a look at LaTeXML or TeX4ht.  Both of these tools allow you 
to create xhtml.  If you use a custom style sheet, you can even specify 
extremely strict compliance.  Converting from XHTML to epub  is pretty 
straightforward.
   


The last time I checked, TeX4ht was rather terrible at working with 
xelatex source code. I hadn't looked at LaTeXML, but any tool that 
implements its own interpretation engine for TeX source is basically 
going to be "not good enough".


Building an epub file from the boxes and typesetting as found in a 
dvi/xdv file means all the computations have already been performed (and 
are, presumably, correct!) and will allow the generation of an 
alternative format document with the same (default) layout as the 
dvi/xdv or a PDF generated off that dvi/xdv.


- Mike


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[XeTeX] xe(la)tex to epub?

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi all,

just wondering: is there an output driver that will generate an epub 
rather than pdf file from xe(la)tex source? I know it's less precise 
than pdf files in terms of boxing, but epub demand is high, and it 
allows reflowing much more naturally than pdf making it a far more 
suitable format for documents that are released for small screen devices 
(regardless of whether we call them ereaders, tablet pcs, slates, or 
etch-a-sketches). Basically it'd be a good compliment to the standard 
pdf output when generating public documents (parallel format generation 
makes users and customers happy) but I don't think I've seen an output 
driver for this... just custom "latex to .epub converters", which aren't 
really useful. Something that operates on xdv/dvi would be far superior.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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[XeTeX] xe(la)tex to epub?

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi all,

just wondering: is there an output driver that will generate an epub 
rather than pdf file from xe(la)tex source? I know it's less precise 
than pdf files in terms of boxing, but epub demand is high, and it 
allows reflowing much more naturally than pdf making it a far more 
suitable format for documents that are released for small screen devices 
(regardless of whether we call them ereaders, tablet pcs, slates, or 
etch-a-sketches). Basically it'd be a good compliment to the standard 
pdf output when generating public documents (parallel format generation 
makes users and customers happy) but I don't think I've seen an output 
driver for this... just custom "latex to .epub converters", which aren't 
really useful. Something that operates on xdv/dvi would be far superior.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Combined sub- and superscript

[Michiel Kamermans]

Since this has to do with the box alignment of sub/super script, I'm 
fairly certain this has nothing to do with fontspec at all. Instead, 
let's just write our own macro for isotopes:


\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Linux Libertine O}

% align by adding phantom text and moving the entire block left
\newcommand{\isotope}[3]{%
\newbox\aweight% atomic weight
\setbox\aweight=\hbox{#1}%
\newbox\anumber% atomic number
\setbox\anumber=\hbox{#2}%
% write isotope with phantom weight in number, and phantom number in weight,
% moved left by whichever is the least wide
{\ifdim \the\wd\aweight>\the\wd\anumber \hskip-\the\wd\anumber \fi%
\ifdim \the\wd\aweight<\the\wd\anumber \hskip-\the\wd\aweight \fi%
\ifdim \the\wd\aweight=\the\wd\anumber \hskip-\the\wd\anumber \fi%
\mbox{$^{\hphantom{#2}#1}_{\hphantom{#1}#2}$}${#3}$}}

% and of course we need a simple test text for this macro
\begin{document}
Let's look at our standard mildly radioactive \isotope{14}{6}{C} 
isotope, and figure out where it goes. We could use something like 
\isotope{228}{88}{Ra} but that would be overkill...

\end{document}

(there might be a more efficient way to do the dimension comparison, but 
if there's one TeX topic that you're never going to find a normal, 
simple explanation page for using google, it's working with plain box 
dimensions and mathematical operations on dimensions for things like 
if/then. It's all infuriatingly hidden in the TeX book and TeX by Topic, 
and the minds of a handful of really good TeX/LaTeX/XeTeX package authors)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] ** ERROR ** sfnt: Freetype failure...

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 7/28/2010 6:14 AM, tala...@fastmail.fm wrote:

I have just run the two problematic files through a piece of Mac software called 
"textsoap", which "cleans up" the text. Apparently, there were some hidden, 
offending glyphs or characters that were causing the problem. The file now compiles fine using 
Baskerville 10 Pro.
   


Actually, given the error that you got, that solution shouldn't have 
worked. If the problem was with just unknown characters, your log should 
have read something along the lines of "character not supported" for 
each of the offending glyphs. Is it possible to see the original problem 
.tex and full log?


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Japanese, Chinese, Korean support for Polyglossia

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Wilfred,


The Korean hangul script is already phonetic, so it does not need ruby. Kanji 
are used in Korea, but mostly to indicate place names and family names.
   


Yeah, hence phonetic guide text (so, text that accompanies chinese 
characters), not just phonetic text. You can still stick hangul over 
hanja for guide text purposes, but I don't think there's a special name 
for this in Korea, mostly because hanja are used so little.


Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] Japanese, Chinese, Korean support for Polyglossia

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 7/23/2010 1:02 PM, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:

Just one comment, since we seem to be converging on agreement :-)

Gerrit wrote:


I don’t think that there is Ruby used in academic writings in Taiwan.


It all depends what you mean by "academic" : Ruby is most certainly
used in texts used to teach the Chinese language to children, which
some might classify as "academic".


A little term confusion - "ruby" is the rather nonsensical name that's 
been given to the practice by western typesetters (thank you, ruby 
typeface, for being the smallest movable type available at the time the 
term was invented) but in practice we're talking about "furigana" (for 
Japanese), and "zhuyin fuhao" or the cuter "bopomofo" for Chiense 
(mostly Mandarin, but several other phonetically related variants of 
Chinese as well) - it's actually widely used in Taiwan. I am not aware 
of any phonetic guide text practices in Korea.


- Mike



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Re: [XeTeX] Japanese, Chinese, Korean support for Polyglossia

[Michiel Kamermans]

This kind of sounds like a job for a massively huge tome of knowledge: 
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514471 (CJKV Information Processing, 
Second Edition)


- Mike




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Re: [XeTeX] Japanese, Chinese, Korean support for Polyglossia

[Michiel Kamermans]

David,

Ruby is already enabled (if you are using a font that supports it).  
See the fontspec package documentation.  Fontspec also allows you to 
select a number of other options relevant to CJK typesetting -- take a 
look. (It doesn't address all the issues you raise, though.)


The ruby opentype font feature is of almost zero practical value, as 
virtually no font comes with it, and even if they did it would not 
necessarily be an appropriate looking fontface (furigana and main text 
in no way need to -or in many cases are even desired to- look the same) 
one often wants a higher readbility font for furigana, or even a 
sans-serif (Japanese "gothic") font fact instead. I know I personally 
still rely on the custom ruby code found in this mailing list's archives 
in the dicussion on ruby/furigana and Japanese typesetting simply 
because it lets me stick in a font change for texts where the main 
Japanese font is not suited to double as furigana font.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] [OT] Free fonts for fontspec examples?

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 7/15/2010 4:04 AM, Ryo IGARASHI wrote:

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA512

Hi, Will,

Just to comment on 3., only for Japanese font stuff.

2010/7/12 Will Robertson:
   

3.  All of my Japanese examples use the Hiragino fonts distributed
with Mac OS X; are there any free alternatives I can use that supports
features such as ruby, kana style, annotations, "CJK Shape", and
so on?
 

Free (in the Open Source Definition sense) Japanese fonts which I am
aware of (and having English explanation) are
   


To add to that,

- Ume Mincho (http://sourceforge.jp/projects/ume-font/releases/), 15563 
glyphs (no kern pairs... go Japanese! =), supports kana/vert features 
only as far as I can tell.


- HAN NOM A/B 
(http://vietunicode.sourceforge.net/fonts/fonts_hannom.html), 
technically a general CJKV font, massive glyph span, but no opentype 
features as far as I can tell.


You could perhaps post a request for some test fonts on the OpenType 
list, adobe's doing some wonderful things at the moment with CJKV fonts 
(particularly the kazuraki font - 
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2010/01/kazuraki_available.html -  
if you can convince Ken Lunde to share it for testing purposes =).


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com



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Re: [XeTeX] combining characters in isolation

[Michiel Kamermans]

Mike,


If I do
   \newfontfamily\bengalifont[]{Bangla}
it works fine; I don't get the dashed circle.  In fact the space 
character doesn't even have to be inside the scope of the script.


But if I do
   \newfontfamily\bengalifont[Script=Bengali]{Bangla}
I get the dashed circle.  So apparently setting the script makes it 
pay attention to whether there is a Bengali base character for the 
combining character to combine with.  But not specifying the script 
causes other problems, namely the combining characters don't combine 
correctly with a Bengali base character when there is one (which of 
course is most of the time).


Guess I could fix my original problem without breaking the output and 
without making the XML non-portable by modifying our code that tags 
Bengali text during the conversion from XML to XeLaTeX...


Luckily this is a far simpler problem than the original one! Simply 
define two fonts to be used:


\newfontfamily\bengalialphabetonlyfont[]{Bangla}
\newfontfamily\bengalifont[Script=Bengali]{Bangla}

Then use the first only for your script-illustration tables, and the 
second as blanket font for your Bengali text.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] xelatex crashes with a large document (TL2010)

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 6/24/2010 9:07 AM, Pablo Rodríguez wrote:

Hi there,

I have installed TL 2010 from TUG and XeLaTeX crashes with rather 
large documents (books not written by me). It crashes also with 
--no-pdf option activated.


I'm afraid that I cannot provide a minimal sample, I cannot make the 
texts available. all I can do is to attach the crash below.


What about if you scramble the content (ie, replace all words with 
abcdefg... strings of equal length) with a quick 
perl/php/python/whathaveyou script?


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com



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Re: [XeTeX] Font Browser

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Gerrit,

I wonder, if you maybe know about a font browser for Windows which 
will show me the Opentype tables?


I know that I can actually use the Opentype features in Xetex, but my 
problem is that I don’t always know, which features the font actually 
possesses. So I thought about a font browser, where I can see e.g. the 
character “1” and then select “Oldstylenum” and the glyph changes.


Microsoft's extended font properties.

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/truetypeproperty21.mspx

Install, right click on font, click the "features" tab.

- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com



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Re: [XeTeX] embedding fonts

[Michiel Kamermans]

hh,


Of course I'm aware that some fonts are available at most as subsets as they 
are protected
by the owners.  But anyway, there should be an option to embed the full font if 
possible.
Also the standard fonts (e.g. Helvetica) should be embedded, bacause there are 
just too many version around.
   


Indeed, although for ensuring the font data is the right font's you can 
normally rely on subsetting already. Xe(La)TeX+xdvipdfmx handles that 
quite well in my experience.



I use Adobe CS4 suite on XP. Strange enough in the older versions one could at 
least choose in the Distiller for full embedding, but not anymore (don't know 
if it would have helped). And I do not know what to change in xdvipdfmx to 
change the behaviour there.
   


I still use Acrobat 8 (9 simply hasn't come with anything worth 
upgrading for), but I never checked whether its distiller will do full 
font embedding for already generated pdf files (and I'm not going to use 
XeLaTeX to generate anything but pdf files). For any casual editing 
(manually setting document properties, swapping some pages in/out, etc) 
I use acrobat, but for real work like swapping out subset fonts for full 
fonts --or automated metadata manipulation-- there's only one option, 
and it's called Ghostscript. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it's 
about as powerful as it gets when it comes to manipulating every aspect 
of a pdf file.


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] embedding fonts

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 6/3/2010 8:37 AM, hh-bra...@bol.com.br wrote:

Is there a way to ensure that adobe distiller or acrobat pro embed the full 
fonts in the pdf-document produced with xelatex. Or can you name any program 
which can do that.
The printing houses insist on full fonts because that way they can (sometimes) 
correct errors (generally with the - expensive - pitstop program).
But when I checked the pdf files gained with xelatex, only subsets were saved, 
which is not enough.
   


You may want to contact your printing house about the fact that they 
apparently want to do things that your publisher should be doing, 
instead, but that's a professional argument. (Personally, I would never 
accept my printing house changing my publications; any errors in print 
will be revealed in proof runs, and it is my and my publisher's 
responsibility to review the proofs until we are satisfied that there 
are no errors left in it before approving publication runs)


But, back to your problem: what you're looking for is Ghostscript. This 
is a scripting language for manipulating ps and pdf files, and one of 
the many, many things it can do is font embedding. Note that you can 
only LEGALLY do this if the embedding policy indicated by the font 
allows "editable" embedding (meaning the font may be embedded for the 
purpose of editing the document, using that font), or "installable" 
embedding (which means the font may be installed permanently on a 
system, rather then being only temporarily available to the program 
that's accessing the pdf file).


http://colinm.org/tips/latex should help you on your way. And while most 
people actually want subsets turned on, you actually want to make sure 
subsetting is turned off =)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] unicode-math testing

[Michiel Kamermans]

At the very least there should be some warning if different versions of
fonts are being used at different stages, but I suppose this could get
very noisy with the common practice of having at least 3 very
different fonts all claiming to be Helvetica-Italic, so perhaps it needs
to be added to some list of debugging flags and left off by default.
   


Noisy is good. A user should be informed about all possible errors, and 
using a font that the user may not have indicated certainly violates the 
idea that TeX source compiles identically on every machine it's run on. 
Of course, operating system limitations such as the inability to 
concurrently install different versions of the same font cannot be 
detected, and the current implementations don't allow us to specify 
which font version number should be used, but aside from that, if TeX 
sees three fonts, it definitely needs to go "ZOMG MY OMG! You are in a 
world of font hell if I don't tell you about this" =)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] unicode-math testing

[Michiel Kamermans]

I do not get this bug when doing a compile on windows server 2008, 32 
bit version.


windows: Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6002]
xelatex: This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.2-0.9995.1 (MiKTeX 2.8)

Possibly very silly question: did you try this after making sure no 
fonts were cached anywhere? =)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] word cloud or tag cloud in XeLaTeX

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 5/23/2010 9:38 AM, Juan Francisco Fraile Vicente wrote:

Thanks, Mike!
I am asking about both of the methods. The first could be the better, 
perhaps. But there is this web: 
http://www.tocloud.com/javascript_cloud_generator.html that gives the 
html code. I mean also more complex clouds , like those with cross 
words (vertical and horizontal). Perhaps this only need a littel bit  
of time texing, but I'd like to know if someone has developed a style 
or package to do these things.


I don't think anyone's written a package to do that (yet). I don't think 
you should even want to using LaTeX to do word cloud abstraction form 
some data (that's simply not what it's good for), but if you already 
have the data and you want to text visualise it, then I think the 
easiest approach would be something akin to writing a command that takes 
your formatted data, normalised to - say - 10, sticks it in a box, and 
then lets TeX do its thing by relying on the relsize package. Something 
that would look like


\begin{wordcloud}
\cloudentry{Google}{6}
\cloudentry{Yahoo!}{3}
\cloudentry{Bing}{0.8}
\cloudentry{AOL}{0.2}
\end{wordcloud}

with

\newcommand{\cloudentry}[2]{
\renewcommand{\magstep}{#2}
\larger #1\smaller}

and a new environment definition that sets up a box of some sort (or 
not, depending on whether you want the text in a box or not). Quite 
terribly I can't remember how to plain-TeX an "if #2 > 1, do ... else 
..." construction, but you'd want to set up the magstep (which tells 
relsize by how much to increase/decrase font size) and then use 
\larger\smaller if the value is greater or equal to 1, or 
\smaller\larger if the value is less than 1.


Not the most amount of help, but hopefully enough to get things going.

- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] word cloud or tag cloud in XeLaTeX

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 5/22/2010 8:52 AM, Juan Francisco Fraile Vicente wrote:
I haven't found info about this issue. How could be word-clouds done 
(as web tag-clouds) in LaTeX or XeTeX? I think they could be done 
managing tabular, font sizes or other options, but my question is if 
there's a package to do these weighted lists of words.


Are you asking about the process of making word clouds in TeX, or do you 
already have the word cloud data with words and relative weights that 
you want to input into some meaningful (Xe(La))TeX command that will 
turn it into relatively sized data?


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Vertical Japanese in memoir with fontspec

[Michiel Kamermans]

Pander,

>


I use the XeTeX interchar solution for that in my book. I use Palatino 
Linotype as main font, but it lacks a lot of extended latin characters, 
such as ǒ (o with caron). Luckily, FreeSerif's ǒ looks virtually 
identical to what Palatino Linotype's "should" look like, so I have ǒ 
assigned to interchar class 9, a la


\XeTeXcharclass `\ǒ 9% o with caron (used in Pinyin orthography 
for Chinese)
\XeTeXcharclass `\′ 9% prime and double prime for time 
(minute/second)

\XeTeXcharclass `\″ 9

and simply let XeTeX deal with the switching for me, using

\XeTeXinterchartoks 0 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 1 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 2 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 3 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 4 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 5 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 6 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 7 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 8 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 10 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 255 9 = {\extlatinfont}

(my book uses several character classes, simply because even if some 
font has glyphs for certain things, they might in fact be very ugly! 
Palatino has glyphs for unicode quotation marks, for instance, but 
they're horrible. Instead, I make XeTeX swap in Adobe Caslon Pro and 
things look peachy)


>


The code, as is, relies on fontspec, so technically it should work in 
other fontspec-supporting TeX flavours (such as LuaTeX). However, I 
never tested that, so I honestly don't know =) If it had to be moved to 
a package, I'd say move it to the ruby package, but it would have to 
become aware of horizontal vs. vertical text direction.


>


It's not free, but for non-commercial purposes it comes for free with 
Adobe's acrobat reader. For commercial purposes, it also comes with 
every normal windows/mac Adobe product.


You can use TTX to determine which features are supported but they're a 
bit fragmented. The easiest method I know of is windows's extended font 
properties method, which installs into windows and gives you lots of 
additional "properties" tabs when you check a font file's properties, 
amonst which is the list of supported opentype features per script.


As for your PDF of free fonts, I know most of these, but one very 
important thing you may want to consider is whether or not a font is 
useful for actually writing Japanese. Kana-only fonts, for instance, are 
basically just toy fonts. They serve no practical purpose, and I'm not 
quite sure what the people who make them think they're making, but 
Japanese font, they make not.


Limited-kanji fonts, too, are of questionable use. Hakushu offers free 
version of their fonts, for instance, but these are essentially the 
"shareware" versions of their real fonts, and only contain 1000 kanji, 
making them useless for actual Japanese text. You won't be able to use 
them for something even as basic as writing out the いろは poem, for 
instance. (Their real fonts cost between $100 and $200 each, if you buy 
then separately. And package deals don't start until $600 =)


On a note of completeness, you seem to be missing two rather important 
fonts: Hanazono (http://fonts.jp/hanazono/) and HAN NOM 
(http://vietunicode.sourceforge.net/fonts/fonts_hannom.html). The first 
is a large freeware alternative to the common OS-supplied gothic/mincho 
fonts, and the second is a full CJK-ExtA+B implementation, and while it 
does not use the Japanese kanji, but Chinese zi, it is an excellent 
fallback font for rare or old characters. In addition, you're also 
missing Code2000/2001/2002, which is perhaps not the prettiest, but 
certainly more complete than most fonts on that list! =P


- Mike




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Re: [XeTeX] Vertical Japanese in memoir with fontspec

[Michiel Kamermans]

Vafa,

I almost know nothing about vertical typesetting but can not you do 
vertical typesetting by some rotation?


Yes and no. For the normal syllabic scripts and chinese characters, you 
can. However, there are also half-height OR half-width characters, 
depending on the writing direction. In horizontal writing, しゃく has a 
half-height や, but in vertical writing, it would be し on top, then a 
half-width や, and then a く. Punctuation is radically different too. 
For instance, これは日本語です。 ends with the symbol [。], which is 
essentially a circle in a quad's lower-left quadrant. For vertical 
writing, this is instead [︒], with the circle in the upper-right 
quadrant. Quotation, too, is different, with 「これ」 being horizontal 
style, but vertically being written as ﹁, then こ, then れ, then ﹂. 
These are not just "rotated" but having different glyph metrics in 
vertical form.


In fact, almost all (proper) CJK fonts rely heavily on the vert/vrt2 
features to indicate glyph substitution in vertical mode, and has been a 
bit of a bother up until basically today still =)


(hopefully fontspec 2, once all open issues are resolved, will have 
solved that =)


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Vertical Japanese in memoir with fontspec

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Pander,

can you attach that .tex to a reply, since the page you linked to has 
inserted delicious and utterly useless linebreaks =)


I've done Japanese vertical typesetting using XeLaTeX and Fontspce 
(although I ditched Memoir at some point because it wasn't playing nice 
enough with glossaries and indices).


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Em-dash

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 5/4/2010 1:11 AM, Wilfred van Rooijen wrote:

Hi all,

This seems to be precisely the issue. Xetex can read and understand 
all unicode characters, but at this time, the only way to communicate 
with the computer is through the keyboard and the mouse. Thus, there 
will always be issues with "special characters". I don't know if it 
exists, and if not it may be interesting to develop, but a keyboard 
with LCD keys would be nice.




http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/

It exists, it's not the most ergonomical, and it's a bit pricy. But my 
biggest problem with it is that it's a good idea but using the wrong 
technology: you don't want LEDs, you want "only require power when you 
set them" keyfaces, so E-ink would be infinitely preferable (but there 
are no E-ink keyboards =). Then you also know what they keyboard can do 
when you turn off the power, or the system goes on standby, because the 
faces don't disappear.


In the mean time, for infrequent characters my personal stance is to 
just use a character selector program such as Babelmap on windows (I 
forget the name on the Mac, it's quite a nice utility). For frequent 
characters, at least in windows and I assume in other OSses as well, you 
just install an extra kayboard mapping for the language in which the 
characters are frequent, and alt-shift cycle your way to that language. 
For instance, to get accented Dutch characters in windows, you'd add 
Dutch as keyboard mapping, and typing "e will produce ë. A friend showed 
me this can easily de done in Ubuntu as well, so I presume all the *nix 
flavours including MacOS allow for this.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] Diacritics

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 5/3/2010 4:02 AM, José Carlos Santos wrote:
Then I will have to work without the xunicode and xltxtra packages. I 
hope that that will not create new problems.


You could, but what's stopping you from using the actual letter ń?

Incidentally, you only have to load the xltxtra package, not xltxtra + 
xunicode + fontspec. (that just makes it try to load xunicode and 
fontspec twice).


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] experimental new xetex version - with margin-kerning support

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 5/3/2010 2:00 AM, John Was wrote:
Excellent - does this mean that custom kerning from within XeTeX is 
moving up the 'to-do' list?  It seems to me to be in the same 
general area (aesthetically though perhaps not technically):  one 
wants to fine-tune the spacing behaviour of specific characters from 
within the program rather than by editing the font (which may not be 
legal).


Not to mention it would stay in line with the TeX "it compiles the same, 
everywhere" philosophy. Can't redistribute a modified font, but you can 
certainly give people some XeTeX source with the message "and use this 
specific font, version ..."!


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] Scaling graphics

[Michiel Kamermans]

Ulrike,


Well most of the graphics on my pc have either no dpi entry or 72,
but I found one with 300dpi and this too is larger (x4) when used
with xelatex. (it is not a graphic I can share so we can't test if
it works for you too).


Odd... I did a minmal example with the jpg that Jose linked to, and it 
indeed becomes way too large. However, when I compare it to one of the 
graphics I use in my book 
(http://grammar.nihongoresources.com/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media=gyousho.jpg 
), 
running xelatex on the following code makes it look exactly as big as 
the image indicates it should be...


\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\section{Figura\textunderscore 3-1.JPG}
\includegraphics{Figura_3-1.JPG}
\section{gyousho.jpg}
\includegraphics{gyousho.jpg}
\end{document}

There's two differences between the two, one in the amount of EXIF data, 
the other in the presence of a "thumbnail" encoding in my image which 
comes with its own 72dpi... now I'm wondering which image graphicsx 
actually picks up! If it picks up the 72dpi thumbnail instead of the 
300dpi actual image, that'd be a pretty severe bug in graphicx.


I'll see if I can "rig" an image so that the thumbnail looks nothing 
like the actual image, and see what the resulting pdf looks like.



I checked the image properties with irfanview and it shows 601x601
dpi and resolution unit "inch".
   


I used IrfanView too, intrestingly enough I get different values now 
that I'm back home and have downloaded the jpg to this machine 
instead... Still leaves an interesting mystery.


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] Scaling graphics

[Michiel Kamermans]

No, I can reproduce your problem with miktex 2.7 too.

Your picture is 1886 pixel wide and declares its resolution to be
600 dpi. This gives a "natural" width of 8cm and this width you get
with pdflatex.

But xetex seems not to take the resolution into account but use a
resolution of 72 dpi. This gives a "natural" width of about 66cm and
so scaling it to 0.4 is not enough.
   


Hmm, that's interesting. I use images at 1180x650px at 300dpi for my 
book, but these are added into the tex source without any scaling 
factors, and come out at the "right" size (4"x2" approx).


So that leads us back to the jpg itsef - two things I notice about the 
jpg are a different vertical and horizontal dpi (601 and 600 
respectively). Although not "wrong", it is very strange, since pixels 
are typicall 1:1 or 3:4 scaled... never 601:600 =) I also don't see a 
"resolution unit" value set in the jpg, which could be a problem, as 
that value is typically used to determine the "natural width" of a jpg 
image! This value should be "2", to indicate the dpi value actually 
really does apply to inches, and not some other unit of measure.


I don't have a machine with XeTeX installed on it available at the 
moment, so if someone can create a new jpg in photoshop, paint.net, gimp 
or anything else that will save dpi based on square pixels and sets the 
resolution unit to inches when saving to jpg, it should be reasonably 
simple to verify whether or not this was the problem.


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] Em-dash

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 4/30/2010 7:29 AM, Alan Munn wrote:


On Apr 30, 2010, at 10:16 AM, José Carlos Santos wrote:


Hi all (yes, it's me again!):

If I compile this file:

\documentclass{article}
\pagestyle{empty}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xunicode}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
\begin{document}
---
\end{document}

with XeLaTeX, then I get a PDF file which contains a single 
character, namely an em-dash. But if I add, say, \setmainfont{Arial} 
before \begin{document}, then what I get is ---. Why? Do I have to 
use \textemdash instead?


No.  When you specify the main font, just specify the Mapping:

\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Arial}

This tells xelatex to convert the latex conventions (such as --- )  
(and other things) to the proper unicode versions.


It's set by default for CM fonts, I guess.


Just beware that it might also perform other ligature substitutions when 
tex mapping is enabled (not a bad thing, just not always desired)


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] Table of contents

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 4/30/2010 1:56 AM, José Carlos Santos wrote:
Since no sophisticated solution appeared (or occurred to me), I shall 
do that. But I think it is a flaw.


You don't need a sophisticated solution when the simple one is the only 
correct one. In the old days we had to worry about which character set 
we were using because different sets gave you different characters at 
identical codepoints. In the old, dark days of not-a-lot-of-memory and 
"there are other languages?" land, resolving chr(128) could give you the 
euro symbol, or it might be the first byte in a multi byte japanese 
character, and  - and this is the important part - the file you were 
reading wouldn't in any way indicate wtf you were supposed to do.


With more modern computing technology available, and a realisation that 
there are such things as other countries and writing systems, this 
became ridiculous, and we came up with a new way of doing things: 
unicode, mirrored by the ISO/IEC 10646 standard. This convention 
specifies a huge character map with every distinct character-entity in 
its own spot, and specifies various ways in which you can encode the 
parts of that map that you actually use efficiently in a file, so that 
on average storiung unicode data takes up an irrelevantly small amount 
more diskspace than storing it using the crooked concept of codepages. 
More importantly, data stored in unicode can TELL you that it's stored 
in unicode. With that, the world finally realised how much better things 
were if the data actually indicated how to decode it, instead of having 
people go "okay but... what the heck codepage is this text file actually 
in?".


The whole reason XeTeX exists is because there was no real unicode 
awareness in the various flavours of TeX until Jonathan Kew started 
making one: the lack of indicating an encoding in XeTeX is not a flaw, 
but represents a victory for people who actually want to write things 
properly: this is what we should have had in the first place, if there 
hadn't been all those early computing technological restrictions. It 
finally let us all write in every language imaginable without having to 
worry about whether or not that letter we wanted was in the code page we 
were using, and if it wasn't, how to construct what should be an 
arbitrarily simple character using lots of TeX code to combine letters 
and symbols in ways that only worked for that one font we were actually 
using. By going with unicode, XeTeX made, and still makes, things 
intuitively easy. You write your text, XeTeX compiles what you wrote, 
and you are not bothered by trying to figure out whether or not the 
character you want is in the codepage you're using.


Of course, note that this is is very different from needing to verify 
that the character you want is in the font you are using. codepage tell 
you which characters even exist as far as the computer is concerned. 
Need a lambda symbol when you're writing something n cp1252? Tough, it 
doesn't exist. Not just "in the font you are using", it simply doesn't 
exist until you change the codepage for your entire data context to 
something else.


Codepages are a thing from a dark past, when typesetting was severely 
impaired by fonts simply not being big enough to actually contain all 
the letters people might need, and there not being a well defined 
codepoint mapping for glyphs (what you see with your eyes) and 
characters (what the thing you're seeing actually represents).


At this point in time (finally, one might add) only old operating 
systems still really care about codepages - the rest have moved on to 
embrace a world where it doesn't matter what language you write in, 
because letters from one language are no longer mutually exclusive with 
another. In the TeX world, too, there's great efforts being made to 
ditch the antique concept of codepages, with XeTeX and LuaTex constantly 
improving.


If you want to typeset things nicely, and you actually care about the 
language you're using - you're using French, so you really should care-  
don't use cp1252; ANSI is the *AMERICAN* standard for an 8-bit character 
set. Codepages were invented to overcome the problem of only having 256 
spots for letters. Unicode solved that problem. Why make XeTeX use a 
solution for a problem that doesn't exist anymore?


- Mike


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Re: [XeTeX] Table of contents

[Michiel Kamermans]

As you may guess from its contents, the encoding that I am using is
cp1252. If I compile this file, then, at the table of contents I get
"Général de Gaulle", instead of "Général de Gaulle".

I can eliminate this by commenting the line

\XeTeXdefaultencoding "cp1252"

but I want to have it there in order to be able to have a file for each
chapter and to use the \include command. What should I do?


Simplest solution? Remove the codepage instruction and tell your text 
editor to save the files as utf8 instead.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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Re: [XeTeX] accented character ṛ within \section {ṛ}

[Michiel Kamermans]

On 4/26/2010 12:41 PM, Ross Moore wrote:

Hi Herb,
Just curious... what happens when you try to do search within or a 
copy from a pdf which has such combined characters?


PDF has the /ActualText(...)  replacement tagging feature. This allows 
you to capture a sequence of content characters
and declare the whole collection to be equivalent to a single (or 
sequence of) Unicode point(s).


But, that only works if you add an /ActualText command. As far as I can 
tell, using a compound glyph as discussed here will not be a problem in 
a search, *provided* that the software you're using implemented the 
unicode collation algorithm correctly, in which case for this type of 
thing it shouldn't need the /ActualText command for searching to work.


That said, I have no idea how many PDF readers other than Adobe's 
Acrobat actually use a correctly and fully implemented unicode collation 
algorithm.


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com


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