2012/8/15 Philip TAYLOR <p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk>: > > > Zdenek Wagner wrote: > >> You can see demonstration on my page: >> >> http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/freefont-devanagari/ > > > What /should/ be seen here, Zdeněk ? As a non-Indologist, I may > be missing something obvious (indeed, I probably am !), but I cannot > see the difference in the two samples on my screen : > >> compare Sanskrit: शक्ति to Hindi: शक्ति (if everything works, you should >> see the difference). > Unfortunatelly most (maybe all) web browsers cannot switch the ligatures according the language, they use DFLT which is Hindi in FreeSerif thus the Sanskrit KTA conjunct is not shown (firefox in my Linux does not show it either). If you switch Language=Hindi or Language=Sanskrit (I know the syntax in fontspec for XeLaTeX, I do not know how to do it in plain XeTeX), you will see the difference. Thus XeTeX is better than web browsers. I do not know whether MS Office can do it. What can be seen in the samples is the correct spacing around punctuation. Indic scripts require different spacing not only around dandas and double dandas but also around question and exclamation marks (these European punctuation marks are not used in Sanskrit but are used in nowaday's languages). This is demonstrated only in PDF (by mechanical replacement). Most Devanagari fonts have it wrong. If you typeset an English text with GNU freefont, the question and exclamation marks will be properly set according to the English rules but when the script is switched to Devanagari, the same font will produce correct Indic spacing. Steve White knew how to implement it, big thanks to him.
Maybe one day web browsers will fully implement the lang and xml:lang attributes and will be able to switch the language features. > > Philip Taylor > -- Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
