Re: Syriac Script

On 18 Oct 2005, at 1:23 pm, Malte Rosenau wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've recently discovered that XeTeX does not properly work with my  
> syriac
> OpenType fonts (Meltho fonts). In the following example the contextual
> ligatures won't show up:
>
> \documentclass{article}
> \usepackage{fontspec,xunicode}
> \begin{document}
> \fontspec[Script=Syriac]{Estrangelo Edessa}
> ???
> \end{document}
>
> Is this a result of OS X's incomplete support for syriac? Any  
> chance to make this work in XeTeX?

It's not a result of OS X's incomplete support, but ICU Layout's  
complete lack of Syriac shaping support. The Meltho fonts rely on  
OpenType rather that AAT layout technology, so XeTeX would use them  
via the ICU layout library -- but it doesn't know about Syriac, and  
so they won't work.

See "Submitting ICU Bugs and Feature Requests" at http:// 
icu.sourceforge.net/bugs.html to file bug reports for the ICU  
library. If Syriac gets added to ICU, then XeTeX will have support  
for it.

(Of course, if someone actually contributes the code, rather than  
merely requesting an enhancement, that's better still.)

The other way to get Syriac to work in XeTeX would be via an AAT  
Syriac font -- but I'm not aware of any that are available. A  
knowledgeable developer would be able to add AAT tables to the Meltho  
fonts, I guess, but there are not many skilled AAT font table  
programmers around.

JK