I am not sure this made it to the full list. Therefore, I am forwarding it.
My problem with FreeSerif has been solved. Everything is working now, even the page headings with the help of FakeSlant. I think it is the best font yet for those of us working with Devanagari on a regular basis. Best Neal
--- Begin Message ---2012/9/8 Steve White <stevan.wh...@googlemail.com>: > Hi Neal, > > I'm very pleased to hear it's working for you! > > Could you please write to the mailing list, to let them know? (To > date, the advice has been "don't use FreeFont".) It would be great to > see your working examples there, too. > I had some communication with Neal off list so I will summarize now. 1. Devanagari is a script used for several languages. They differ mainly in the repertoire of ligatures used, the full list being used in Sanskrit. Up to now, there anre Snaskrit fonts (not usable for Hindi, Marathi etc. because the users without education in Sanskrit will be unable to read them), Hindi fonts (not usable for Sanskrit due to missing ligatures), Marathi fonts (not usable even for Hindi), yet all of them use the Devanagari script. FreeSerif is the "new generation" font because it supplies the Devanagari script and the set of ligatures are set according to the language. FreeSans does not contain all Sanskrit ligatures. 2. The Devanagari block is missing in the italic shapes in both FreeSerif and FreeSans. In order to use them, AutoFakeSlant has to be specified. The default value is 0.2 if not given. Written shortly, Neal Delmonico uses Charis SIL as the default font and FreeSerif as the Sanskrit font. In order to have it work with all Sanskrit ligatures and italic, the header shouldbe as follows: \usepackage{xltxtra} \usepackage{polyglossia} \setmainfont{Charis SIL} \newfontfamily\sanskritfont[Script=Devanagari,Mapping=RomDev,Language=Sanskrit,AutoFakeSlant=0.195]{FreeSerif} Mapping=RomDev is only needed if the text is input in transliteration, if the text is typed directly in UTF-8, it is not needed. For those who need more information: FreeSerif contains the Velthuis glyphs (I hope that the PFB files hand-tuned by Karel Piska were used). Positions of matras were precisely adjusted. Some characters with nuktas require different positions of u and uu matras in order to be readable and the nukta were visible and Steve made it. Consonants ka and pha need different position of e and ai matras. All this is done. FreeSans is derived from Gargi. It seems to me that Gargi was a Marathi font because unlike Hindi, Marathi does not use characters with nuktas. The characters with nuktas were present but there half forms were missing. Thus the font was almost unusable fot Hindi. I know that nuktas are often omitted in Hindi, ja is often used instead of za (some people even pronounce jaruur instead of zaruur), pha is often used instead of fa, qa is almost always replaced with ka. The correct half forms were added to FreeSans. Nowadays fonts often omit the classical kra ligatures. I have asked my Indian friends and they replied that the they would prefare the classical shape. It was therefore made by Steve. And as with FreeSerif, positions of matras were precisely tuned. I forgot to mention positions of anusvaras. They are used in Hindi in the oblique case in plural and with verbs in plural feminine. The situation may be quite complex with some words and the position of anusvaras in all possible cases was tuned in order to make the words readable. Indian typographers use larger spacing preceding punctuation. In Sanskrit only dandas and double dandas are used but nowaday's languages accept also question and exclamation marks. The same spacing is expected (a few years ago I read an article written by an Indian typographer but I am not able to find it now). Majority of Devanagari fonts do not take it into account. Native users thus tend to enter a space preceding punctiatiom marks which leads to incorrect line breaks where punctuation may appear at the beginning of a line. It would be necessary to enter a fixed-width nonbreakable space but it is not usually available on a keyboard. FreeFont uses correct spacing. The same punctuation marks behave properly both in the Latin and Devanagari scripts (both FreeSans and FreeSerif, tested in a longer Hindi text). It was a huge amount of work but now all aspect of typesetting in Devanagari are properly set. Due to Steve's big care it is now the most beautiful Devanagari font. Remember that Unix distributions often come with an older version of GNU FreeFont. If you want to use the current version as distributed with TeX Live 2012, you have to delete the system fonts and follow the post-install actions as given in the TeX Live manual. The new version of the GNU FreeFont will then be available to the system, no applications relying on the existence of the font will be broken (verified by me in four different Linux distributions). > I still haven't got it going. Near as I can tell, this tec file isn't > being read at all. Yes I ran mktexlsr. I also tried putting the tec > file in the same directory you mentioned, although it couldn't > possibly be right for my setup. Clearly your directory setup is > different from mine. I'm just using the stock Ubuntu distribution. > > Maybe it's not so important, but I wouldn't mind seeing it work, myself. > > Cheers! > > > > On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 5:42 PM, Neal Delmonico <ndelmon...@sbcglobal.net> > wrote: >> Hi Steve, >> >> Sorry for all the trouble. As you probably know, we got FreeSerif to >> work for me. Now all the conjuncts are working. I had to add >> Language=Sanskrit to my header line. The page headings still don't work >> for some reason. That is my biggest concern now. Why doesn't it work >> and how can I get them to work. >> >> I place my tec file at: >> >> /usr/local/texlive/2012/texmf-dist/fonts/misc/xetex/fontmapping/RomDev/RomDev.tec >> >> Don't forget to run mktexlsr after placing the tec file. >> >> As I mentioned before, I use to TeXWorks to run xeLaTeX on the master >> file. I assume the comparable command line call would be: >> >> xelatex dev-test-master.tex >> >> Yes. I just tried that and it works. I did notice a message that may >> have something to do with the page heading failure: >> >> ** WARNING ** Invalid CMap mapping entry. (ignored) >> ** WARNING ** Unable to read OpenType/TrueType Unicode cmap table. >> ** WARNING ** Failed to load ToUnicode CMap for font "FreeSerifItalic" >> >> I have no idea what a CMap is, but perhaps it just means there is no >> italic form for the font. >> >> Zdenekji, >> >> You mentioned using some FakeSlant feature in a previous note. Any idea >> how I would do that for the page headings? Where would I look to find >> out? >> >> Best >> >> Neal >> >> PS Attached is the resulting pdf from the command line execution. >> >> On Sat, 2012-09-08 at 12:30 +0200, Steve White wrote: >>> Hi, >>> >>> OK the teckit_compile was my fault. The github page gave me an HTML >>> file named RomDev.map. >>> >>> So I downloaded somadeva-RomDev-7d80889.zip . This has a .map file >>> that teckit_compile would accept. Now I have a file >>> RomDev.tec >>> >>> Now, where do I put that so xelatex can see it? I tried >>> /usr/local/share/texmf/fonts/misc/xetex/fontmapping/RomDev.tec >>> but it had no effect. There are no other .tec files on my system. >>> Googling hasn't been of much help. >>> >>> Funny, no errors or warnings about RomDev appear in the .log file. >>> >>> Neal, where is your .tec file located? >>> >>> Again, what exact command do you give to xelatex in order to build your pdf? >>> >>> Cheers! >>> >>> On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 11:48 AM, Steve White >>> <stevan.wh...@googlemail.com> wrote: >>> > >>> > Attemts to build your test >>> > -------------------------------- >>> > I had to make some changes to the header5.tex >>> > * changed all the font names to FreeSerif >>> > * removed lines referring to Bengali >>> > >>> > I guess the transliteration conversion is done by RomDev. >>> > >>> > I got a copy at >>> > https://github.com/somadeva/RomDev >>> > and follwed the instructions to make a .tec file from it at >>> > >>> > http://cikitsa.blogspot.de/2010/07/how-do-i-install-romdev-mapping-for.html >>> > Unfortunately, the command >>> > teckit_compile RomDev.map -o RomDev.tec >>> > produces nothing but errors, like >>> > not within a mapping rule at line 1136 >>> > EncodingName or LHSName must be specified at line 1150 >>> > compilation failed: status = -9 >>> > >>> > What do we do now? >> -- Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
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