[xep-support] Indic support

[W. Eliot Kimber]

Lorna_Priest at sil.org wrote:

> As far as I can tell there is no Indic support in XEP. Is that correct?
> None of the shaping (reordering, ligatures, etc) that is in a Devanagari
> OpenType font is happening. And if so, are there plans to provide Indic
> support?

As far as I know, of all the XSL-FO implementations, only XSL Formatter 
currently supports glyph composition for Devanagari and Thai (the two 
most challenging modern languages I've had to deal with so far) and 
Deveangari is only supported under Windows when printing through the 
Windows API (i.e., printing to Distiller rather than doing direct-to-PDF).

As far as I know XEP supports Arabic and Hebrew glyph shaping correctly 
but explicitly does not support glyph composition for any Asian 
languages. It's got to be a difficult technical challenge so I'm not 
surprised that support is spotty at present.

But I'm not sure what you mean by "Indic support"--I initially read that 
to mean "support for Indic numerals" but clearly you mean something 
different.

[I've just been debugging XSL Formatter's support for Devanagari script, 
so your mention of Devanagari caught my eye. One of my customers markets 
mobile devices in India, which is, apparently, either the largest or 
fastest growing market for mobile devices, so support for Hindi is 
getting some focus :-)]

Cheers,

Eliot
-- 
W. Eliot Kimber
Professional Services
Innodata Isogen
9390 Research Blvd, #410
Austin, TX 78759
(512) 372-8122

eliot at innodata-isogen.com
www.innodata-isogen.com
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