On 19/07/2010 21:10, David Perry wrote:
I've been reading 10.17 (version of July 11, 2010) and have some questions, and found
one typo.
I will let Will comment on your interesting feedback. I only have a few minor observations
below.
10.17 (the very beginning)
It would be helpful to have an example of the script and language selection in use. I
use the Junicode font, which contains an OT lookup to provide the Icelandic form of the
letter thorn rather than the Old English form when text is tagged as Icelandic. What is
wrong with this?
\fontspec[Language=Icelandic]{Junicode}
Þis is the letter þorn in the Icelandic language, using Junicode
It compiles without protest, but I still get the default Old English shape for thorn.
(My document is already using Latin script, so I didn't specify that specifically.)
There may also be some interactions of script and language. A friend asked me to help
him get Sanskrit working in XeLaTeX. He's using the Devanagari script (I am told that
Sanskrit is sometimes written in other scripts). He's on a Mac using an AAT font, so he
should only need to use:
\fontspec{Devanagari MT}
right? At first I told him to include
\fontspec[Script=Devanagari]{Devanagari MT}
but later realized that's only for OT. The second paragraph of 10.17 does mention this,
but a footnote or parenthetical remark ("Don't do this with AAT fonts!") might save
people like me who work almost exclusively with OT from making silly mistakes.
Hmm... I realize that polyglossia implicitly assumes OT fonts only: I should add a warning
when encountering AAT or Graphite fonts. The new fontspec has convenient macros to check
for that I think.
I take it he does NOT need to specify [Language=Sanskrit]. Later on, if he gets an OT
font that has some special features for Sanskrit (if such a font exists--I'll call it
RigVeda) and wants to use it on his Mac, then he would write:
\fontspec[Script=Devanagari,Language=Sanskrit]{RigVeda}
to automatically select the ICU renderer and enable the special stuff for
Sanskrit. Yes?
10.17.1
Typo: TRK is the tag for Turkish in OpenType; tur is the ISO tag. (See
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/ttoreg.htm)
Yet many "real-world" OT fonts mistakenly use TUR instead of TRK for Turkish, hence in
this particular case fontspec needs to check for both when "Language=Turkish" is specified.
A brief explanation beyond the phrase "OpenType definition" might be helpful too for
those who don't know the OT tags yet (especially since they are not the same as the ISO
tags with which people might be familiar).
The phrase "Further scripts . . . " confused me. First I thought it meant the ability
to add scripts or languages not already defined in fontspec. But fontspec already knows
all the ones that are defined in OpenType, so how could one add a new script if it
doesn't have an OT tag, since the OT tag is required for the definition? And the
examples showed a script and a language that are already in fontspec. Does it mean
something different?
I think (Will can correct me if I'm wrong) these are generic macros used internally. They
are nevertheless accessible to the end-user, just in case some font (designed, say, for
Klingon or, perhaps more seriously, for specialized ethnolinguistic uses) were to use
language and/or script tags not defined in the current OpenType standard. A sentence
clarifiying this might be helpful though.
FC
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