[XeTeX] patach furtivum in biblical hebrew

[David J. Perry]

Furtive patah will work in Cardo.  Just type the patah after the consonant 
and it will be moved to the right automatically.  Nothing else is required. 
I set things up this way to make it as easy as possible for users, without 
assuming that any OT features such as contextual alternates would be 
supported.  (The Hebrew features in Cardo were created several years ago, 
when OT support was less widespread than it is today.)  Typing the patah 
after the consonant may seen counterintuitive, given the pronunciation, but 
it provides consistency (all vowels entered after the consonant) which made 
life eaiser when I devised the Hebrew lookups.

You are correct that a mechanisms to handle something like furtive patah 
must be defined in the font.  I have not studied the SIL font so I can't say 
how they do it.  The documentation for a Hebrew font should tell you this 
(as Cardo's does).

Contextual alternates are supposed to be on by default in an OS or font 
renderer, but they are not always.  Even if they are on, they are not the 
only way of handling furtive patah.  Cardo does not contain any contextual 
alternates for Hebrew, which is why you got the error message you did.

David
(developer of Cardo)


This does not
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Carsten Ziegert" <carsten_ziegert at sil.org>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 12:12 PM
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] patach furtivum in biblical hebrew


>I agree, this feature should be enabled by default.
> Thanks for all answers and remarks!
> Carsten
>
> Am Donnerstag, den 16.09.2010, 15:41 +1000 schrieb David Purton:
>> Hi Carsten,
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 02:50:38PM +0100, Carsten Ziegert wrote:
>> > Thanks, David, that works well with the Contextuals in SBL Hebrew.
>> >
>> > Actually, it does not work with Cardo, xelatex says:
>> > Package fontspec Warning:
>> >     OpenType feature 'Contextuals=Alternate' (+calt) not available
>> >     for font "Cardo/ICU",
>> >     with script 'Hebrew',
>> >     and language 'Default'.
>> >
>> > So I conclude that it has to be defined in the font. On the other hand,
>> > why does it work with Ezra SIL "out of the box"? maybe someone can
>> > enlighten me:
>> > There are fonts using contextuals by default, fonts which require an
>> > option for fontspec and fonts which do not use contextuals at all. Is
>> > this right?
>>
>> hum! You can tell whether a font supports contextual alternates with
>> otfinfo. e.g.,
>>
>>     $ otfinfo --script=hebr -f SBL_Hbrw.ttf
>>     calt    Contextual Alternates
>>     ccmp    Glyph Composition/Decomposition
>>     jalt    Justification Alternates
>>     kern    Kerning
>>     mark    Mark Positioning
>>     rlig    Required Ligatures
>>     salt    Stylistic Alternates
>>     ss01    Stylistic Set 1
>>
>> I don't have Cardo, but Ezra SIL only lists calt and ccmp. Perhaps it
>> uses some other method for its layout (guess)?
>>
>> I confess that it is not clear to me which OTF features are
>> automatically enabled for a given font, and it was some time before I
>> realised I needed to turn on calt for SBL Hebrew. This does seem like a
>> feature that should be enabled by default though. And I only sort of
>> understand what jalt does (It is hard to find info on the net :( ) So I
>> don't know if I should enable this or not (or even if it is supported).
>>
>> cheers
>>
>> David
>>
>>
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>
> -- 
> Carsten Ziegert
> Association SIL / Chad
> mobile: +235 63.78.58.00
> skype : carstenzi
> http://www.sil.org
>
>
>
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