Back in 2018, I was trying to use LuaTeX to typeset multiple scripts.
(We needed its capability to tell you where on the page bounding boxes
were.) LuaTeX worked ok for some scripts, but failed for example for
Tamil, where glyphs don't always appear in the same order on the page as
their underlying characters do. This sort of issue arises with many
Indic scripts, and something similar would probably happen with Burmese,
which in some ways is an even more complex script than other Indic ones.
At the time, I recall the LuaTeX developers saying they were not
interested in solving this issue, and that instead script-specific
libraries should be developed. (I'm going by memory here, I don't have
links to that discussion, although see here:
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/.)
Since that time, Khaled Hosny has conducted an "experiment" (his term)
in using HarfBuzz in LuaTeX
(https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-1/tb124hosny-harfbuzz.pdf, as reported in
2019), and Kai Eigner also did similar work
(https://github.com/tatzetwerk/luatex-harfbuzz). The LuaTeX wikipedia
page says LuaTeX "includes" the HarfBuzz engine (and links to the above
two reports).
I haven't tried LuaTeX in recent years, but it sounds like if you ran
Burmese through it and used the HarfBuzz shaper instead of the
default(?) shaper, it might work for Burmese.
I'll be interested to hear what you find.
Mike Maxwell
On 9/9/2023 2:29 PM, Andrew Goldstone wrote:
Thanks--it turns out that xelatex still segfaults if I attempt to
combine ucharclasses and \XeTeXinterwordspaceshaping=2 in a longer
document. I do think this is a bona fide xetex bug but don't have the
knowledge of the xetex source to trace it further.
As for lualatex it seemed to have more trouble than xelatex with the
complex ligatures in Burmese. The lineation issues are a lower priority
for my colleague than simply being able to typeset his mixed-script
text, so I'll help him to a workaround with xetex, if no other
suggestions for fixes are forthcoming.
All best,
Andrew
Sat, Sep 9, 2023 at 5:37 AM Ulrike Fischer <ne...@nililand.de
<mailto:ne...@nililand.de>> wrote:
Am Wed, 6 Sep 2023 10:40:16 -0400 schrieb Andrew Goldstone:
> I believe this is the same issue as was raised on StackExchange
in 2019
>
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/503498/trouble-with-stacked-consonants-burmese-script
<https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/503498/trouble-with-stacked-consonants-burmese-script>
> but I couldn't find any further discussion of a fix for the crash.
I don't think that there is a fix and the xetex development is
rather stale. Personally I would try with lualatex.
--
Ulrike Fischer
http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/ <http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/>
