[tex-live] Fontconfig for XeTeX versus regular fontconfig

[Zdenek Wagner]

2011/10/28 Vafa Khalighi <vafaklg at gmail.com>:
>
>
> 2011/10/28 Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>
>>
>> 2011/10/27 Martin Schröder <martin at oneiros.de>:
>> > 2011/10/27 auxsvr <auxsvr at gmail.com>:
>> >> Martin Schröder wrote:
>> >> Well, then is there any reason to use xetex at all? Would switching to
>> >> LuaTeX or pdfTeX lead to fewer problems? Are they more actively
>> >> maintained?
>> >
>> > As of now polyglossia works only with XeLaTeX.
>> >
>> And how about ArabXeTeX? Is it ported to luatex?
>>
>
> Not yet. There are two stages for porting arabxetex to lualatex:
>
> 1) bidi: You need to develop both TeX bidi and unicode bidi. As the main
> developer of bidi package I know how things should be implemented for TeX
> bidi. Almost 80 percent of bidi implementtaion for xelatex applies to LuaTeX
> but one needs to change primitives etc. The second part is unicode bidi,
> unfortunately I have no expertise in this area, my plan is to work with
> Behdad Esfahbod, Rouzbeh Pourander and my other countrymen who are experts
> on unicode bidi (i.e. Behdad is the main developer of fribidi). Unicode bidi
> should be done entirely in lua. Anyone willing to help with extending bidi
> package to support lualatex is more than welcome. In fact, in the past I
> asked Khaled id he would be interested but he had no interest.
>
I am not able to help with this part but I may test the work. I know
just a little Urdu but may try to typeset Urdu/Hindi texts. I looked
into the Urdu-Hindi dictionary to see how the lines are broken in case
of combination of LTR/RTL texts within a paragraphs. I hope this may
be useful test in some later stage.

> 2) arabxetex mapping does not work in luatex since luatex does not support
> mapping as XeTeX does. So there are two options at least: either we need to
> do it with catcode just like what arabtex does or find some other way by
> using lua or using .fea files if possible.
>
\catcode is dangerous, it was removed from Velthuis Devanagari years
ago due to problems. If the package was combined with musixtex or with
arabtex (to typeset Urdu and Hindi), superfluous Greek characters were
output. I hope there is a lua hook that could be employed. I plan to
use it for Devanagari and the mechanism for the Arabic script will be
the same. I can help with it but I will not have time till the end of
year.



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz