[XeTeX] Arabic ligatures

[Jonathan Kew]

On 5 Jul 2004, at 11:49 pm, Musa Furber wrote:

> In this bug, that font is not alone....
>
>> I'll file a bug report with Apple re Al Bayan, but obviously it'll 
>> take some time before a fixed version appears.
>
> ...and perhaps Apple will take more note since other fonts share the 
> problem...
>
>> Meanwhile, I suppose you could insert a zero-width non-joiner between 
>> the alef and lam, to prevent the ligature formation; but it will 
>> prevent getting the special ligature for "Allah". And you don't 
>> really want to clutter your text like that. Better to use a different 
>> font. Does Baghdad look any better than Geeza to you? Or how about 
>> DecoType Naskh, if you have it; I'm not sure which systems that 
>> shipped with.
>
> ...like Badghdad and DecoType Naskh.

I'm not seeing the same behavior with those fonts....

> Too bad, too, since the Baghdad and Naskh fonts looks better. Or 
> should I say "font"? I have them both and they look identical.

... nor do they look identical.

What versions of these fonts do you have? FontBook can show you the 
versions, as well as where the fonts are installed, if you hover over 
them in the list. I wonder if perhaps you have older versions; though 
even that doesn't explain why they'd look identical. Something isn't 
right there.

Jonathan