I've been reading 10.17 (version of July 11, 2010) and have some
questions, and found one typo.
10.17 (the very beginning)
It would be helpful to have an example of the script and language
selection in use. I use the Junicode font, which contains an OT lookup
to provide the Icelandic form of the letter thorn rather than the Old
English form when text is tagged as Icelandic. What is wrong with this?
\fontspec[Language=Icelandic]{Junicode}
Þis is the letter þorn in the Icelandic language, using Junicode
It compiles without protest, but I still get the default Old English
shape for thorn. (My document is already using Latin script, so I
didn't specify that specifically.)
There may also be some interactions of script and language. A friend
asked me to help him get Sanskrit working in XeLaTeX. He's using the
Devanagari script (I am told that Sanskrit is sometimes written in other
scripts). He's on a Mac using an AAT font, so he should only need to use:
\fontspec{Devanagari MT}
right? At first I told him to include
\fontspec[Script=Devanagari]{Devanagari MT}
but later realized that's only for OT. The second paragraph of 10.17
does mention this, but a footnote or parenthetical remark ("Don't do
this with AAT fonts!") might save people like me who work almost
exclusively with OT from making silly mistakes.
I take it he does NOT need to specify [Language=Sanskrit]. Later on, if
he gets an OT font that has some special features for Sanskrit (if such
a font exists--I'll call it RigVeda) and wants to use it on his Mac,
then he would write:
\fontspec[Script=Devanagari,Language=Sanskrit]{RigVeda}
to automatically select the ICU renderer and enable the special stuff
for Sanskrit. Yes?
10.17.1
Typo: TRK is the tag for Turkish in OpenType; tur is the ISO tag. (See
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/ttoreg.htm) A brief
explanation beyond the phrase "OpenType definition" might be helpful too
for those who don't know the OT tags yet (especially since they are not
the same as the ISO tags with which people might be familiar).
The phrase "Further scripts . . . " confused me. First I thought it
meant the ability to add scripts or languages not already defined in
fontspec. But fontspec already knows all the ones that are defined in
OpenType, so how could one add a new script if it doesn't have an OT
tag, since the OT tag is required for the definition? And the examples
showed a script and a language that are already in fontspec. Does it
mean something different?
Thanks - David
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