[xep-support] Support for Arabic Glyph Shaping?

[David Tolpin]

> If XEP can do Arabic glyph shaping and Thai glyph composition it will be 
> very close to matching XSL Formatter for internationalization support. 
> These two features are one of the key reasons that my multinational 
> customers cannot consider XEP as a solution right now.

Eliot,

many multilingual customers do use XEP as the solution right now.

> The only other real showstopper for us is lack of full-page footnotes 
> for multi-column pages (I have a client that uses footnotes within 
> multi-column pages and the footnotes must be page wide).

To implement it is a matter of time, and only one of our clients ever considered
it as a limitation.

> Also, XEP's interpretation of the implications of writing mode on 
> region-body is not consistent with XSL Formatters and is probably not 
> consistent with the intent of the FO spec (but the jury's still 
> out--I've submitted a query for clarification to the editors list but 
> the WG has yet to take up the issue). This means that in certain layouts 
> it may not be possible to have interoperable FO instances between XSL 
> Formatter and XEP. This difference is compounded by a limition in XSL 
> Formatter, which is that it cannot handle multi-page block-containers, 
> so you can't use block-container as the child of a flow in order to set 
> the writing mode for the entire flow, something I think you can do with 
> XEP (but I haven't tested it).

XEP's implementation is consistent with the explicit wording of the specification.
Switching writing mode midway within one word if the word is hyphenated and
adjacent pages have different writing modes may not be an intent of the recommendation.

The lack of functionality in XSL Formatter (and this lack of functionality is
in contradiction with explicit wording of the recommendation -- it explicitely
always for block-containers to generate several areas) should hardly be a cause
for RenderX team to implement non-compliant behaviour.

David
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