[xep-support] XEP, Uniscribe, and Complex Fonts

[Nathaniel Grove]

Hey XEP-Support,

I work for the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library, and we have quite 
happily used XEP to produce PDFs of an on-line journal we publish 
(www.jiats.org). Recently, I have been trying to create a PDF with 
Tibetan Unicode font in it. Tibetan is a complex script, much like 
Devanagari or Arabic, in that letters combine and form different glyphs. 
We've created a Open Type Unicode Tibetan font mainly with substitution 
tables in it. However, such a font properly renders in Windows only when 
there is access to the Uniscribe (ups10.dll) system library. I read in 
the archive that:

    XEP is a Java application. It does not use platform-dependent API.
    Uniscribe is a Win32 API for multilingual writing; XEP has no
    access to it.

But, that was in 2004, and I was wondering if there has been any 
advancement in XEP's dealing with complex OpenType fonts, some work 
around its inability to access Uniscribe, such as using the Java 
OpenType class.

If not, can you suggest any way that we might be able to create PDFs 
with Tibetan script?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Than Grove

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