On 18/2/16 23:39, Kamal Abdali wrote:
On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 9:51 AM, Jonathan Kew <jfkth...@gmail.com <mailto:jfkth...@gmail.com>> wrote: Here's an example in Urdu script. There are 3 pages, all containing the exact same text. Page 1 has \XeTeXinterwordspaceshaping = 0, so this is what existing xetex would produce. Page 2 has \XeTeXinterwordspaceshaping = 1, which allows the font to kern across the inter-word spaces; in some cases this makes the space width substantially negative, so that adjacent words actually "overlap" to some degree. This avoids the large visual "gaps" that sometimes occur on page 1, depending on the shapes of the adjacent words. Page 3 has \XeTeXinterwordspaceshaping = 2, so we get the exact same line-breaks as page 2, but with some (relatively subtle, mostly) improvements to the actual shaping at word boundaries. Hope this helps to illustrate why this feature is important (in certain specialized cases). For such effects, I have so far relied on the WordSpace option of \newfontfamily command in the fontspec package. Two samples (urdusample0.pdf and urdusample1_5.pdf) of running xelatex on the same Urdu text as yours are attached. They have WordSpace set to 0 and 1.5, respectively. They are using another Nastaleeq font since I don't know anything about Awami. The new converts to Nastaleeq like the interword spaces eliminated completely, and this seems to be the default in Urdu word processors for Nastaleeeq. My need is the opposite. As I wouldn't write "Thequickbrownfoxjumpsdoverthelazydog" in English, I would prefer words to be separate in Urdu also. I don't want to start an ideological debate here but mention this just to plead to you to allow in your system some way of allowing interword spaces liberally.
Note that the new features in xetex do not in any way enforce a particular way of writing (for Urdu or anything else). The inter-word spacing is primarily under the control of the font designer; \XeTeXinterwordspaceshaping merely makes it possible for xetex to more accurately follow what the font designer specified.
It is still possible to use TeX features such as \spaceskip (or higher-level macros) to adjust things as desired, in cases where you want something different from the font's "natural" spacing.
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