[XeTeX] ledmac in XeTeX?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 10 Jun 2004, at 11:51 am, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 10 juin 04, à 12:38, Somadevah at aol.com a écrit :
>
>>  I tried various values for \lineskiplimit and the spacing is indeed 
>> better. But I fear that ledmac does really need the exact values of 
>> character's height and depth to do its thing properly. The page still 
>> looks like there are random values of vertical glue scattered around, 
>> even if I use a single OT font. I look forward to your updated 
>> version...
>
> I found that the accented characters have wrong vertical spacing (and 
> indeed the wrong shape as well) if you include accents and 
> non-alphabetical characters the standard LaTeX way instead of the 
> normal Unicode way, i.e.:
>
> \"a instead of ä
> \'e instead of é
> `' instead of ‘’
> ``'' instead of “”
> -- instead of –
> --- instead of —
> etc.
>
> Maybe that's what affects you here. With XeTeX you really have to go 
> Unicode all the way, I think.

Yes; or else stick with standard TeX fonts for which there are tfm 
files and all that. You definitely can't expect things like plain TeX 
or LaTeX accent commands to work with AAT/OT fonts. Those commands not 
only require metrics that aren't available, they are also specific to 
the (idiosyncratic) font encodings of the old TeX fonts, and need to be 
redefined for different encoding schemes.

Somadevah at aol.com wrote:

>>  I tried various values for \lineskiplimit and the spacing is indeed 
>> better. But I fear that ledmac does really need the exact values of 
>> character's height and depth to do its thing properly. The page still 
>> looks like there are random values of vertical glue scattered around, 
>> even if I use a single OT font. I look forward to your updated 
>> version...

If I can find some time, I'll try to look at ledmac and see what's 
actually happening; or could you send me a sample PDF illustrating the 
sort of problems you're seeing with different fonts?

Jonathan