Re: 10+ reasons why I still use MKII

From: Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny@eglug.org>
To: "Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد" <ishamid@colostate.edu>
Cc: mailing list for ConTeXt users <ntg-context@ntg.nl>,
	Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>,
	Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: 10+ reasons why I still use MKII
Date: Thu, 13 May 2010 23:06:09 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20100513200609.GA6041@khaled-laptop> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <op.vcns7q1k60pfzx@ihamidnb.libarts.colostate.edu>

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 01:46:28PM -0500, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس  سماوي حامد wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, 13 May 2010 10:00:01 -0500, Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl> wrote:
> 
> >On 13-5-2010 4:32, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> >>On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 04:16:12PM +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:
> >>>On 13-5-2010 3:42, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>\startyoumayignorethis
> >>>>The only thing that really bothers me are so much different vertical
> >>>>differences which show up in almost every document I ever write. MKIV
> >>>>consistently takes more vertical space, so no matter what document I
> >>>>try to recompile, it always ends up with more pages (and some weird
> >>>>page breaks) when processing it with MKIV.
> >>>
> >>>\startcantresistmode
> >>>
> >>>the lineheight relates to the ex height and as in mkiv we don't have
> >>>the tfm limitations (those 16 values of ht dp) we have slightly
> >>>different spacing
> >>
> >>Something I find very annoying is variable interline spacing, if I've,
> >>for example, a line with some Arabic words vocalized I get some times
> >>too much white space above it that it almost looks like an empty line.
> >>It makes the page look like crap. Is there a way to force fixed
> >>interline spacing?
> 
> Can you give an example?
> 
> >turn turn grid on .. but even then, we need some nice heuristic
> >for determing the right ht/dp ratio for arabic (can be set up)
> 
> I have some nice texts that illustrate a standard balance, but I'd
> like to see what Khaled has in mind exactly before I comment
> further...

Nothing special, I always expect interline space to be fixed, I don't
know if TeX always make interline spacing variable, but this wasn't an
issue with English text. However, with Arabic, Tashkil marks seems to
always cause a noticeable extra whitespace above the line.
See the uneven distribution of vertical whitespace in this example (it
can be even worse than this in reality):

\usemodule[simplefonts]
\setmainfont[Arabic Typesetting][features=arabic]

\starttext
\pardir TRT\textdir TRT
\dorecurse{10}{\dorecurse{20}{نص عربي } نَصُّ مُشكَّل \dorecurse{20}{نص عربي}}
\stoptext

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer
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