Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:
On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 10:08:33 -0700, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
Many people know something about Aleph, but I guess that not so many are using it. I've seen some
Your message died off, but feel free to ask me any questions u have about Aleph, which I use quite extensively, and without which I would be lost-)
(Scary! I thought I saved the message under drafts - I have no idea how I managed to send it without even noticing that.) Thanks for your kind reply. I mainly wanted to ask if someone could have written something about Aleph to the wiki. There is hardly any info about it on internet except the Hans's manual. There's a mailing list, which is hardly active and there are a couple of one-sentence descriptions spread over different tex-related sites. So the wiki might be a good place for "Aleph homepage". I was wondering about the current state of development (which you mostly described in this mail) - ie. that there is some effort to include the functionality in pdfTeX, that it's stable and currently not developed that fast. It would be nice to mention how to manipulate fonts with many glyphs and how to use them. For example, there's a font Arial Unicode on every PC with Office with over 50.000 glyphs. Since we (PC users) are not able to use XeTeX, it would be fine to have an example of how to use this font under windows and perhaps an example of how to typeset arabic, hebrew or some other (right-to-left) language. How can symbolic fonts be used there? Patrick has enough to do, I'm sure, but perhaps there could be some collaboration with Hraban (and you?) to enable also some more fancy fonts and languages to be used on the garden. I think that Patrick already put some effort into enabling Chinese to work (I'm not sure about it). Currently there are also many .tfm for common fonts missing. If Aleph could work there as well and if some additional fonts would be installed, this would be fantastic. Thanks again, Mojca
Giuseppe is the main developer and we owe him a great debt of gratitude for stabilizing it to the point where it can be used for reliable bidirectional production purposes using large fonts. Personally, I really cannot thank him enough-)
Hans & Co. are pursuing getting all of Aleph's useful features into pdftex, so maybe the the two projects will merge after Giuseppe gets some time.
this would be more than wonderful!
Useful aleph features + opentype support in pdfTeX will open a new vista where the encoding file mess can be thrown away and even virtual fonts will no longer be needed.
One challenge will be replacing the otp filter mechanism with something more user-friendly. I am a bit worried that this will be more difficult than expected, but we'll see.
Best Idris