On 23/2/16 23:49, Bobby de Vos wrote:
On 2016-02-19 03:31, Jonathan Kew wrote:
Note that the new features in xetex do not in any way enforce a
particular way of writing (for Urdu or anything else). The inter-word
spacing is primarily under the control of the font designer;
\XeTeXinterwordspaceshaping merely makes it possible for xetex to more
accurately follow what the font designer specified.
IIRC, the Wikipedia feature Download as PDF uses some sort of TeX engine
to create the PDFs. For such a usage (assuming XeTeX, and where the
author of the macros used does not know the content of the text being
typeset) would setting \XeTeXinterwordspaceshaping = 2 be recommended?
If the font does not take advantage of \XeTeXinterwordspaceshaping,
would then setting \XeTeXinterwordspaceshaping have no effect? That is,
could \XeTeXinterwordspaceshaping be enabled all the time, rather than
being enabled only if the font would make use of that setting?
Note that \XeTeXinterwordspaceshaping = 2 may have some side-effects, so
choosing whether/when to enable it needs to be a decision for the author
or package writer, who can decide whether the results are suitable, or
take precautions (at the macro level) to avoid interference with other
features.
The main issue is that when \XeTeXinterwordspaceshaping = 2 "merges" a
run of words and intervening spaces within a line (or hbox) into a
single node, so as to allow opentype shaping to act across the entire
string, it will move certain other node types -- in particular \special,
\openout, \write, \closeout -- found within the run of text, so that
they appear at the end of it.
This may or may not matter, depending how they're being used; in many
cases (e.g. if \write is generating material for an index or TOC), it
won't make any significant difference. But if \special, for example, was
being used to change the text color, the change will in effect be
"deferred" until the end of the line/text run. Which is probably not
what the author wants.
As xetex has no idea what \special, for instance, is doing, it can't
know which cases are OK to move and which really need to be preserved.
So -- in order to provide the best text-shaping result -- it goes ahead
and moves all these nodes (which are "invisible" to the text layout
process, in that they have no width, etc). If, as an author or
macro-package writer, you know that a particular \special or \write or
whatever needs to stay in place, even at the expense of interrupting
inter-word shaping, then adding \kern0pt before it will ensure this,
because an explicit kern serves as an indication that the author wants
special control of spacing at this point, overriding whatever the
opentype font might do.
JK
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