Re: Arabic protrosion

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد wrote:
> On Mon, 06 Apr 2009 00:40:12 -0600, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny@eglug.org> 
> wrote:
> 
>> The attached patch adds Arabic coma, semicolon, full stop (used in Urdu)
>> and question mark to font-ext.lua for protrusion.
>> Now, combined with glyph expansion, I don't get any overfull boxes.
> 
> Arabic-script microtypography is one of the cornerstones of the Oriental 
> TeX project. We've been studying this matter for some time now:
> 
> Because of
> 
> a) the normal wide spacing around Arabic punctuation, and
> 
> b) the large size of Arabic punctuation relative to Latin,
> 
> I'm not sure that protrusion of Arabic-script punctuation is a good 
> idea. It needs a lot of thought, and a lot of testing, before adding it 
> to the system. As for glyph expansion, I don't see how that works at all 
> with the current model, except perhaps with very horizontal fonts. But 
> in that case all that's needed is smart tatweel, not glyph expansion. 
> For hq fonts the current glyph expansion model will mess up the 
> contextual connections.
> 
> Although one can certainly do things with the current model of 
> protrusion and hz, we need more, much more. Khaled, send me some tests 
> off-list and I'll examine them in light of the overall analysis as we 
> prepare for adding Arabic microtypography support, hopefully pretty 
> soon. Thanks plenty for the contributions, and

ok; in the meantime i added his patches since they don't hurt

Hans


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