On 18 Oct 2005, at 8:20 pm, Malte Rosenau wrote:
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.
Would this work out of the box with XeTeX if those AAT tables were
available?
Yes, it would, as AAT uses a model where *all* the contextual
rendering behavior is built into the font tables and executed by a
generic engine, rather than relying on separate engines for each
complex script, as OpenType does.
FontForge has some limited support for AAT, maybe I can convert one
of the
Melto fonts (it's an TTF flavoured OTF, but I doubt that it will
convert the
contextual stuff automatically) and add those tables myself...
I'm sure it wouldn't happen automatically; I'm not sure whether the
AAT support in FF is adequate to handle Syriac, but I suspect it may
not be. Most likely you'd need to understand the AAT contextual
processing mechanism, which is based on finite state machines, and
create custom state tables to implement the Syriac rules. It's a
steep learning curve, but can be done (for example, with Apple's font
tool collection).
JK
