Re: [NTG-context] Open Type trickery [was Re: Encoding and mapping glyphs from an expert font

Idris Samawi Hamid said this at Sat, 9 Apr 2005 19:27:21 -0600:

On Sun, 10 Apr 2005 00:22:31 +0100, Adam Lindsay wrote:

...

But wait, where are you coming from? Are your source fonts really Minion .pfbs, or are they from OpenType? With OpenType, you can use some nice TeXFont stuff to select the features (OSF, SC, alternates) without having to draw from two arbitrary encodings.

I am very interested in the Open Type trickery. I have been wrestling for quite some time about the problem of multiple accents over ligatures in Arabic. I can do it in Aleph but the present procedure (due originally to Yannis) is much too slow and cumbersome, especially when dealing with huge fonts (my present virtual ovf has about 10,000 characters!). I finally found a solution that OpenType might help with--multiple glyphs for one character. I can implement this without OpenType, but OpenType opens the possiblity for word searches in Acrobat of Arabic text, something that is well-nigh impossible with the usual pfb approach.

I have to admit that last issue is one that I've stepped lightly around.

While we will still need huge fonts, the processing of complicated accents should be much faster with the approach I have in mind (smaller otp's and ovf's).

It sounds a bit tricky with the eTeX line, because of the 256-character- per-TeX-font limit. Not necessarily impossible, but certainly contortionate. I'm led to think about XeTeX--a fair number of people on the list are happy with the AAT/OpenType support they get with some very sophisticated Arabic fonts. And when you consider the educational price of a Mac mini, you're still way below the price of some software packages... :)

Do you think TeXFont can be tweaked to generate ovf's and ofm's as well?

From my experience, it's certainly possible. For it to be done, it needs a confluence of time, motivation, and expertise! -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Adam T. Lindsay, Computing Dept. atl@comp.lancs.ac.uk Lancaster University, InfoLab21 +44(0)1524/510.514 Lancaster, LA1 4WA, UK Fax:+44(0)1524/510.492 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-