Re: can Context render complex scripts?

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

On 14-6-2010 3:21, Michael Saunders wrote:
>> OpenType (just ignore file extension for the moment) is a rather dump
>> standard in the sense that it requires the engine to have some knowledge
>> about the writing system at hand.
> ....
>> So, what we have here is that ConTeXt has no special knowledge about
>> Indic scripts, and thus it will not apply the feature properly according
>> the linguistic rules.
>
> It seems to me that, since Hans can't be expected to write special
> code for dozens of Indic scripts, let alone for every script in the
> world, the pragmatic solution would be a method for Context to harness
> external engines (ICU, Pango, Graphite, Uniscribe, or whatever).  If
> that's not possible, or if he doesn't want to do it, or until he is
> able to work with scholars on each special case, programs like Notepad
> will be able to do something that Context can't.   As a casual user,
> it's not an urgent need for me.  I had read that Aleph functionality
> had been integrated into LuaTeX (though I never found anything very
> detailed about that) and thought that everything was okay.  I assume
> that Luatex/Context or some future TeX  will have this functionality
> someday, however it's implemented.  I'll just keep watching.

if you want to use external engines ... use xetex instead of luatex

the whole idea behind luatex is that we have a configureable and 
programmable engine ... doing some script is not so much an issue (and 
we can do it more flexible once we have the machinery in place) but 
information is needed ... also, as we want tex cum suis to be flexible 
on the one hand and stable on the other, depending on hidden or fuzzy 
features in en uniscribe engine might not be the best idea

in the oriental tex project we've spend quite some time on high quality 
arabic and i'm sure that we could not have come this far if we had wrote 
the code from scratch (all this font technology is not as open as the 
name suggest) ... also, there's more in mkiv than shown so far (esp in 
that area) for those experiments


Hans

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