On Mon, 23 Feb 2009 16:23:59 -0700, Hans Hagen
a quick start but with bad output is not the way to go I was about to forget why I didn't like font fallbacks in the first place, the current font fallback mechanism assigns fonts per Unicode characters, this is fine until we come to common characters like numbers or brackets: you can only assign it to one font, which isn't usually desirable. Think of this sentence: عربي 1234 عربي (English 1234 English (English) English) عربي. Here, the outer most parentheses and first numbers should use the same font of the Arabic text, while the inner ones should use the font of the English text, font fallback can't do this. Instead we need to segment the text per script and apply fonts on whole segments, the Unicode Script Property annex describes a way to handle this, see http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr24/#Script_Names_in_Rendering.
Sure but that can be done by using explicit switches to another 'environment' i.e. explicitly marking sections
I'm not that sure if i want to add some fuzzy automatism which then needs to handle all kind of exceptions too
proper markup is a good solution
Not sure I understand you, but could we do something like the following: Along the lines of \quote, \quotation: Latin text\paren{here is some arabic text\paren[somefallback]{here is some latin} more arabic}. so the fallback will be used when explicitly called. Put another way, could we add a conditional parameter to the fallback macro so that those chars are used only in situations when they are specifically called? \paren[fallback=...] \bracket[fallback=...] \brace[fallback=...] \anglebracket[fallback=...] Best wishes Idris -- Professor Idris Samawi Hamid, Editor-in-Chief International Journal of Shi`i Studies Department of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523