Re: Making necessary OpenType features on by default

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

Khaled Hosny wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 01:28:23PM +0100, Hans Hagen wrote:
>> Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:
>>> On Feb 23, 2009, at 1:09 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
>>>
>>>> For scaling, we can specify a size, some thing like:
>>>>
>>>> \setupbodyfont[arabic=foo,20pt,latin=bar,18pt]
>>>>
>>>> or so.
>>> I don't know Arabic, but I've done similar things for Greek, and that 
>>> is not a good interface. You want a scaling factor, so users won't have 
>>> to worry about scaling in footnotes, titles, etc., an absolute size is 
>>> not a viable alternative.
>> indeed.
>>
>> btw, i have no problem with a bunch of predefined combinations (using  
>> the fallbacks mechanism) so that users can quickly initialize a typeface
>>
>> \usetypescript[fancyarabicwithgreekandtraditionallatin]
>> \setupbodyfont[fancyarabicwithgreekandtraditionallatin,13pt]
>>
>> or so, collected in some type-* file, but that's as far as we can go; we  
>> need to guard at least some minimal quality
>>
>> a quick start but with bad output is not the way to go
> 
> I was about to forget why I didn't like font fallbacks in the first
> place, the current font fallback mechanism assigns fonts per Unicode
> characters, this is fine until we come to common characters like numbers
> or brackets: you can only assign it to one font, which isn't usually
> desirable. Think of this sentence:
> 
> عربي 1234 عربي (English 1234 English (English) English) عربي.
> 
> Here, the outer most parentheses and first numbers should use the same
> font of the Arabic text, while the inner ones should use the font of the
> English text, font fallback can't do this. Instead we need to segment
> the text per script and apply fonts on whole segments, the Unicode
> Script Property annex describes a way to handle this, see
> http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr24/#Script_Names_in_Rendering.

Sure but that can be done by using explicit switches to another 
'environment' i.e. explicitly marking sections

I'm not that sure if i want to add some fuzzy automatism which then 
needs to handle all kind of exceptions too

proper markup is a good solution

Hans

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