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On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 11:42:41AM +0100, Hans Hagen wrote:
Otared Kavian wrote:
Hi Hans, Khaled, and Idris,
If a humble opinion from an ordinary user may be issued, I agree with Khaled that it would be extremely useful to have some basic default settings for Arabic fonts, and even more generally for any particular fonts used for other languages. This would not prevent those specialist typesetters who want particular features to be turned on, to do so through appropriate mechanisms.
As a basic user I am frustrated when using mkiv, that most declaration of features are completely cryptic, and not being a specialist of OTF or other font specifications, I don't know which features are essential for writing and typesetting an article in Persian or any language using Arabic alphabet. While the following is quite easy to understand and to use in XeConTeXt %%%%%%%%%
well, it might be easy to understand given that default features are enabled but on the other hand,. when you want to disable a feature you need to know what is enabled so in practice you have the same problem
Yes, but the majority if people want need that, if I want to play with OpenType features then I'm supposed to know what I'm doing, while most people will be happy with the default features (given it is a reasonable default of course.) [...]
so, it seems to depend on calt but turning on calt by default is *not* what the ms spec recommends for arabtype
you see the problem?
I think is is arabtype's problem if they suggest turning calt off by default, if I've contextual alternatives in my font this means I think those alternatives are necessary to render text correctly, otherwise I would have used a stylistic set. Regards, Khaled -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localizer and member of Arabeyes.org team