[XeTeX] [luatex] Info on direction primitives/implementation

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/12/5 Jonathan Kew <jfkthame at googlemail.com>:
> On 5/12/12 11:56, Joseph Wright wrote:
>
>> Right, so some more thinking required here. The question is what is
>> sensible for new content: from what you say about TeX--XeT and bidi,
>> using pdfTeX/XeTeX is not currently to be recommended for RTL work
>
>
> IMO, this is an overly general and somewhat misleading "blanket statement".
> The TeX--XeT model has its limitations, certainly, but there are plenty of
> RTL documents for which it is perfectly adequate. Not every document
> requires mixed-direction math, or \special-based colour and hyperlinks
> wrapping across lines.
>
> Back when I was doing typesetting on behalf of authors and publishers in
> Pakistan and elsewhere, we used (TeX--XeT-based) XeTeX with considerable
> success and without feeling at all constrained by its bidi shortcomings. But
> then, we were producing "traditional" printed books full of text, not
> colourful, hyperlinked PDFs full of math.
>
I have combination of Czech, Hindi and Urdu in my book:
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/bharat.php

The book is written in Czech but contains words and sometimes even
sentences in Hindi and Urdu. The lines are often broken within the
Urdu text. Since the book contains more than 300 pictures, almost all
paragraphs require \parshape. The book was typeset in XeLaTeX using
polyglossia. I had a lecture on typesetting this book (in Czech), you
can see the abstract of the lecture in Czech and English and see the
slides (in Czech only) here:
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/lectures/floatingtext.php
I wanted to show how the line should properly be broken, in one of the
slides I do it in one \item inside the itemize environtment. You can
see that it works well. At least, in the Urdu-Hindi Dictionary
published in India the lines are broken the very same way. Thus
XeLaTeX allowed me to do whatever I needed.

> JK
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz