[XeTeX] XeTeX Digest, Vol 32, Issue 6

[R (Chandra) Chandrasekhar]

Will Robertson wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I am pleased to announce version 1.12 of fontspec, which is available  
> from CTAN. Only two new features, plus a couple of internal tweaks/ 
> bug fixes:
> 
>   - Support for "external" fonts that aren't installed; e.g.,
>     \fontspec[ExternalLocation]{lmroman10-regular.otf}
>     \fontspec[ExternalLocation=/Users/will/fonts/]{CharisSIL.otf}
> 
>   - The Latin Modern OpenType fonts are loaded by default;
>     if you don't have or want them, load fontspec with the
>     [cm-default] package option instead.
> 
> Download and installation instructions follow, for those who can't  
> wait for a new version of XeTeX to bundle the updates. (Who knows when.)
> 
> 
> *** BRIEF DISCUSSION ***
> 
> This release marks the incorporation of LaTeX's encoding model into  
> how fontspec loads fonts. It is now a requirement to install the  
> "euenc" package that contains the EU1 font encoding. There are some  
> more detailed comments (and explanations) in the euenc.pdf  
> documentation file about what's going on here.
> 
> In the future, I would like to start incorporating some of xunicode's  
> basic features into this encoding, unless Ross can convince us that  
> it's better to forget about LaTeX's NFSS :)
> 
> With the TeX Gyre fonts project I just discovered (extension of the  
> ghostscript fonts to OpenType and 1000-odd extra multilingual  
> glyphs), having our own encoding to load fonts via XeTeX's external  
> font mechanism becomes increasingly important.
>    <http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/tex-gyre/>
> 
> Furthermore, a new encoding could be included for faking accents as  
> discussed in the thread "anti-xunicode ;-)" from July 21 this year. I  
> welcome further discussion on these points.
> 
> *** DOWNLOAD & INSTALLATION ***
> 
> 1. The fontspec package is available from CTAN. It must be extracted  
> from the .dtx file by running `latex fontspec.ins` on the command line.
>    <http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/xetex/latex/fontspec/>
> 
> Place fontspec.sty and fontspec.cfg (if you want the backwards  
> compatibility it provides with old changes to fontspec's interfaces)  
> somewhere like
>    ~/Library/texmf/tex/xelatex/fontspec/
> 
> 2. The euenc package, v0.1:
>    <http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/xetex/latex/euenc/>
> 
> Place the eu1enc.def file and the lm/ subfolder somewhere like
>    ~/Library/texmf/tex/xelatex/euenc/
> 
> 3. Finally, the ifxetex package, v0.2:
>    <http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/xetex/latex/ifxetex/>
> 
> ***
> 
> Please report problems to the list. Good luck!
> 
> Will
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> 
> 

Dear Will,

I can confirm that with the new fontspec and euenc packages a puzzling 
horizontal space that preceded Indic fonts interspersed with Latin text has gone 
away.  Thanks for the fix.

One question, though.  Do the Latin Modern fonts have the glyphs specific for 
Romanized Sanskrit diacritical marks like:

ṛ ṝ ḷ ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ ṣ ṅ ṃ ḥ

If so, I am unable to produce them after running through XeLaTeX.  If not, I 
would have thought that standard TeX accents like \d{r} for ṛ would have done 
the trick, but they do not seem to work either, even with the xunicode package 
and \defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=tex-text}.

FYI, both LaTeX and  pdfLaTeX produce the desired output either with ṛ or \d{r} 
when used together with the packages

\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}

I guess that I am doing something wrong because XeLaTeX should match what LaTeX 
does at the very least.

Finally, with a font like Linux Libertine instead or Latin Modern I have no 
problems in getting the Indic-specific diacritics above.

Any light on how to harness the power of the Latin Modern fonts for Indic 
diacritics is much appreciated.

I am happy to post minimal example files if necessary.

Thanks.

Chandra
07 Nov 06