[xep-support] Issue with font-family property

Marc Wilhelm Küster kuester at saphor.net
Mon Nov 11 00:47:48 PST 2002


Hi!

I have an problem with the font-family property. In my test file I try to 
set a mixture of Latin and Hebrew text with

font-family="Palatino,Arial Unicode Short"

Palatino does not contain Hebrew glyphs, Arial Unicode Short does. Both 
fonts are setup in my fonts.xml and work in principle.

Using this font-family property, only the Latin part of the text is 
actually displayed. Using only Arial Unicode Short, the complete text 
including Hebrew is rendered.

It seems that the program uses only the Palatino font. However, the FO spec 
is quite unambiguous that this should not happen this way (section 7.8.2):

"This property specifies a prioritized list of font family names and/or 
generic family names. To deal with the problem that a single font may not 
contain glyphs to display all the characters in a document, or that not all 
fonts are available on all systems, this property allows authors to specify 
a list of fonts, all of the same style and size, that are tried in sequence 
to see if they contain a glyph for a certain character. This list is called 
a font set."

This issue is acknowledged in XEP spec (notes 12 and 13), but I find it a 
rather hard one to live with.

Will this issue be fixed in the near future? In the meantime, how can I get 
around this problem without explicit font-family-selections whenever an 
uncovered character is found in the text (they are not marked up as such)?

Curious and looking for enlightement,

Marc


*************************
Marc Wilhelm Küster
Saphor GmbH

Fronländer 22
D-72072 Tübingen

Tel.: (+49) / (0)7472 / 949 100
Fax: (+49) / (0)7472 / 949 114
-------------- next part --------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<fo:root xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format" font-size="10pt" font-family="Palatino,Arial Unicode Short"><fo:layout-master-set><fo:simple-page-master master-name="main" page-height="29.7cm" page-width="21cm" margin-top="1cm" margin-bottom="2cm" margin-left="2.5cm" margin-right="2.5cm"><fo:region-body margin-top="1cm"/><fo:region-after extent="3cm"/><fo:region-start extent="2cm"/><fo:region-end extent="2cm"/></fo:simple-page-master></fo:layout-master-set><fo:page-sequence master-reference="main"><fo:flow flow-name="xsl-region-body">

<!--PASS THROUGH text-->
<fo:block>
  Text 1
</fo:block>

<fo:block>
  <!-- Hebrew text -->
  &#x200F;(&#x05D0;) &#x05D0;&#x05D1;&#x05D2;
</fo:block>
<fo:block>
  Text 3
</fo:block>
</fo:flow></fo:page-sequence></fo:root>


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