[XeTeX] Nasta'liq fonts

[Jonathan Kew]

On 20 Feb 2008, at 10:48 pm, maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu wrote:

> Jonathan Kew wrote:
>> On 20 Feb 2008, at 6:47 pm, maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu wrote:
>>> Does anyone here have experience with Nasta'liq fonts?
>>
>> My experience trying these fonts with XeTeX has been rather mixed;
>> there seem to be some limitations in the ICU OpenType support, so
>> often the glyph positioning doesn't fully work.
>
> So what programs are these fonts intended to work well with?

MS Word and other Uniscribe-based programs on Windows, generally.

>
>> ...The best results I've seen so far have come
>> with Monotype's OpenType version of Noori
>> Nastaliq, but this is a commercial font rather
>> than freely available.
>
> And I've never been able to get any response from them about it (there
> doesn't seem to be any kind of email link on their website, and  
> there's no
> mention of this font on the fonts.com website that their "sales" link
> points to).

If you're interested in pursuing this, email me off-list and I may be  
able to put you in touch with someone.

>
> I'm assuming from your response that XeTeX is able to use this font?

Yes, it works pretty well. You can find an example in the slides I  
used when speaking at CS-TUG last November, available online at  
<http://www.cstug.cz/aktivity/2007/CSTUG-talk.pdf>. (See the lower  
sample on slide 44.)

>
>> It's also possible that future updates to the OpenType support in
>> XeTeX will improve things....
>
> You wouldn't by chance have, like, a timetable for this...

Haha.... I thought you might ask that. Well, I'm hoping to update the  
ICU support to release 3.8.1 shortly, but until that is actually in  
place I won't know whether it improves the support for those fonts.  
That should be included in the TeX Live 2008 release, but may or may  
not help.

I'd also like to have other OpenType engines available, including  
Uniscribe (on Windows only, of course) and perhaps Pango and/or  
HarfBuzz. But that's a longer-term possibility.

>
> Tomas Milo (of DecoType) is also working on Nastaliq support, but my
> understanding is that what they are going to produce is not so much  
> a font
> as some kind of rendering machine.  But I probably don't understand.

That sounds like the direction I'd expect Tom to take. In theory,  
XeTeX could probably be made to interface with his engine, but as  
it's likely to be an expensive commercial product, I don't expect to  
actually have opportunity to work on that.

JK