Re: AW: [docbook-apps] ragged index with recent fop snapshots

[Markus Hoenicka <markus.hoenicka@mhoenicka.de>]

Mike Maxwell <maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu> was heard to say:

> The easiest way to get all the LaTeX packages you might need to have  
> installed is to install the latest "TeX Live" distro:
>    http://www.tug.org/texlive/
> It's big, but compared to hard disks these days, no worries.
>

FreeBSD still has teTeX on board, although they may eventually drop  
support given that Thomas Esser no longer maintains the distro. teTeX  
has been good enough for me through the years as I mostly have used it  
for SGML/Passivetex processing once in a while. Moving to TeX Live  
would certainly make sense if I used TeX more often.

> As for the font issue: I'm not sure whether you were using LaTeX  
> (8-bit pre-Unicode characters) or XeLaTeX (Unicode compliant  
> version).  (Both come in the Tex Live distro.)  On the assumption  
> that your XML was Unicode, you should have been using XeLaTeX.  A  
> good Unicode font (and it's nice looking, too) is the Charis SIL font:
>    http://scripts.sil.org/CharisSILfont
> It includes regular, bold, italic, bold italic, small caps, tons of  
> diacritics, IPA etc.  It does not however cover Greek characters.
>

I assume that dblatex and/or teTeX do not have any provisions to  
handle UTF-8 encoded XML files automagically. This may be the point  
where my problems started.

> I'm sure there are Unicode fonts that cover both Roman and Greek  
> characters (Arial Unicode does, but is probably not what one would  
> want for typesetting).
>

I'm currently using two non-Unicode fonts that still have all required  
glyphs. It required a bit of testing though, but many fonts actually  
have a full set of greek characters and those few symbols that my  
document uses.

> The more general solution is to tag the non-Roman strings in XML  
> (either manually or by a script), and create a small XSL transform  
> that tags them for the font when converting to XeLaTeX.  We do that  
> for our grammars, which routinely mix in strings in Perso-Arabic  
> scripts, Bengali script, etc.  Or you could run a script over the  
> XeLaTeX output by dblatex and font-tag the non-Roman strings directly.
>
> You might also want to use the Polyglossia package
>    http://www.tex.ac.uk/ctan/macros/xetex/latex/polyglossia/
> to provide language-specific hyphenation, etc.
>
> And if someone wants help, there's a XeTeX mailing list:
>    http://www.tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex

Thanks for these explanations. Now I'm sure that dblatex would do the  
trick if I put enough effort in setting up things properly.

best regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
http://www.mhoenicka.de
AQ score 38