[XeTeX] FreeSerif not working for me in Devanagari

[Neal Delmonico]

The two problems I mentioned are in the sample I sent yesterday.  I have
attached the same sample as before (and its source file) done this time
successfully with FreeSerif.  Five lines from the the bottom, second
cluster from the right you can see "kimaGgAni."  The Gg is the guttural
n + g combination.  It should have the n on top and the g beneath it.
This is pretty standard.  Instead one has the n with a virama stroke
underneath it and the g next to it.  A little earlier in the same line
the same is true when d + g occur in mAnonnAhAdglapayasi.  That is more
complicated because three consonants are involved: d + g + l.  I have
noticed that even Nakula does not try to combine those.  So perhaps that
is not a fault.  Basically, though, anytime I see the virama stroke used
in consonant combinations, I see it as a conjunct failure.  It is not
that it is wrong.  I have seen plenty of printed examples of Devanagari
texts in which it is done, but it always seems like an eyesore and a
cheap alternative to the proper way of doing it.

What concerns me most is that FreeSerif does not appear in the page
headings.  Here is an example of the code I use for that which works
well with Nakula and Sahadeva and even Sanskrit 2003:

\chapter*{The Leading Ladies (\skt{atha n?yik?bhedaprakaraam})}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{The Leading Ladies (\textsanskrit{atha
n?yik?bhedaprakaraam})} 
\markboth{?r? Ujjvala-n?lamai}{The Leading Ladies (\textsanskrit{atha
n?yik?bhedaprakaraam})}

Why would this produce little empty boxes at the top of the pages
instead of the Devanagari?

These are just problems I have noticed with a glance.  I have not looked
at FreeSerif in a longer text.

Best 

Neal

On Fri, 2012-09-07 at 10:39 +0200, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> 2012/9/7 Neal Delmonico <ndelmonico at sbcglobal.net>:
> > I am happy to say that I finally got it working.  Those Freefonts were
> > installed on my computer no less than four times (not counting texlive).
> > Moodle installed them as did Joomla.  I had installed them from the
> > ports collection and apparently the system installed them, or perhaps it
> > was X-windows.  Anyway, I found them with the X-11 fonts.  When I got
> > them all removed XeLaTeX could no longer find FreeSerif.  I don't know
> > why the Texlive installation could not find fonts it had installed.
> 
> It is explained in the manual in the chapter on post-install actions.
> 
> > Anyway, I downloaded the most recent version of the Freefonts and placed
> > them in the X-11 font directory, ran all the programs so that X could
> > find them and voila! suddenly XeLaTeX could find them too.  Sadly, I see
> > that FreeSerif does not handle some of the common conjuncts well.
> > Guttural n and g do not combine, nor do d and g, for instance.  Also the
> 
> Could you, please, prepare a sample documenting that bug? I do not
> know Sanskrit, I made tests just in Hindi where these conjuncts are
> not used. Steve White will certainly fix it if we write him exactly
> what is wrong.
> 
> > Devanagari was replaced by little empty boxes in my page headings Where
> > I put the Sanskrit titles of the chapters along with their English
> > translations.  Nakula and Sahadeva and even Sanskrit 2003 could all do
> > those things.  FreeSerif is a nice looking Devanagari font, but it is
> > still not up to where it needs to be in order for me to use it
> > regularly.
> >
> Again, prepare a sample. As Steve White wrote a few months ago, he
> cannot fix the bugs if people do not report them.
> 
> > Thanks for your help, everyone.
> >
> > Best
> >
> > Neal
> >
> >
> >
> > --------------------------------------------------
> > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
> >   http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
> 
> 
> 

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: test.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 27480 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/xetex/attachments/20120907/1788de8e/attachment-0001.pdf>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: test.tex
Type: text/x-tex
Size: 878 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/xetex/attachments/20120907/1788de8e/attachment-0001.bin>