[XeTeX] XeTeX bugs in bidirectional typesetting

[Karljürgen Feuerherm]

Hello Vafa,

Yes indeed, I thought it was very kind of you to think of me, and I hope you got my reply at that time. If not, you should know that your careful concern was deeply appreciated.

I wish you the best in this venture. Pity I haven't got the savvy at this point to help.

Happy to help road test though if and when...

Best wishes and thanks for the comment.

K

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 19, 2016, at 11:33 PM, Simon Cozens <simon at simon-cozens.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 20/11/2016 12:35, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
>> For the past 10 years I have reported numerous issues to the LuaTeX 
>> and etex teams without any results but it is more than enough. I am 
>> not going to waste time and energy doing useless things.
> 
> Well, it's not necessarily useless. If both engines are using the same
> model, then you have twice as many communities available to fix bugs.
> And it means the bug fixes and bidi expertise can be shared between the
> two communities. I would also recommend XeTeX moving to the LuaTeX model
> - and then fixing it!
> 
>> I put my time and energy into developing an engine that really has a
>> working bidi model. an engine which is developed by a native speaker
>> and meets the needs of people with real documents.
> 
> XeTeX has a lot of advantages in terms of opentype support, large set of
> packages and mature community. It's a shame the bidi support is not
> great; that is a known problem and there are not many people with the
> expertise to make it work and do it well. As I understand it, the
> problems with bidi were one of the reasons that Khaled stopped working
> on XeTeX, which in a sense is a shame - he's exactly the sort of person
> you need to get this right...
> 
> If you want an engine with a working bidi model, then you might want to
> have a look at SILE. (https://github.com/simoncozens/sile) It uses the
> Unicode bidi algorithm and so you get multilevel reordering without any
> markup required. (See
> https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/arabic.pdf) But
> of course then you don't get the large set of packages and the mature
> community...
> 
> S
> 
> 
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