From: Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk (qrczak@knm.org.pl)
Date: Sun Jul 15 2007 - 09:08:21 CDT
Let's imagine a script with characters for consonants, vowels, and
combinations consonant + vowel. The syllables are constructed in a
systematic way, and thus it's probably better to encode just 40 letters
than 500 syllables.
Forming a syllable is mandatory when a consonant is followed by a vowel,
except in rare cases where it's prohibited. I'm currently using OpenType
ligatures for that. How to encode the case where forming a syllable is
prohibited?
I suppose the answer is ZWNJ, even if it was meant to be advisory.
Unfortunately, in XeTeX at least (which uses ICU) ZWNJ inhibits kerning,
or perhaps requires separate kerning rules for cases involving ZWNJ.
And I need lots of kerning rules for pleasant results (the primitive TTF
"kern" table size limit was too small, and "GPOS" takes 52kB). Is it
possible to specify in a font that ZWNJ should be transparent for
kerning, so it only prevents forming ligatures? If it requires separate
rules for separate combinations, how to specify the kerning of triplets
with invisible ZWNJ in the middle?
BTW, rant: XeTeX is the only Linux software I've found adequate for
typesetting my script. OpenOffice.org is too buggy (e.g. breaks words
consisting of PUA characters at any point, doesn't support ligatures
at all, uses a nonsensical baseline skip for fonts with ulUnicodeRange
bit 57 "Non-Plane 0" set, rounds spacing between paragraphs to full
lines), KOffice doesn't seem to support non-BMP characters at all
and doesn't support ligatures, Abiword has buggy support of non-BMP
characters (copy&paste cuts codes modulo 2**16) and doesn't support
ligatures, standard TeX is too painful for fonts with more than 256
characters, Firefox has wrong spacing for ligatures if they are enabled
and it seems to be unable to print non-BMP PUA. Well, Pango typesets my
text perfectly, with ligatures and kerning, but it's not used by word
processors; paps converts text to PostScript correctly using Pango, but
it provides very little formatting options (e.g. no tables, no line
centering), and going to PDF through PostScript causes unnecessary
violence to a TTF font. XeTeX saved me, it's great!
--
__("< Marcin Kowalczyk
\__/ qrczak@knm.org.pl
^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/
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