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

[Mike Maxwell <maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu>]

On 7/30/2011 5:47 PM, markus.hoenicka@mhoenicka.de wrote:
> 1) I gave dblatex a whirl. It took a while to install missing packages
> from CTAN until dblatex ran at all. Eventually I got stuck when
> (La)TeX told me that a glyph was missing from a font that it intended
> to use. My document uses quite a few greek characters and other
> symbols, but I wouldn't expect LaTeX to have a problem with that. As it
> wasn't apparent to me how to move on from there, I had to give up.

Sounds like you found another solution, but for the record:

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.

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'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).

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
-- 
	Mike Maxwell
	maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu
	"My definition of an interesting universe is
	one that has the capacity to study itself."
         --Stephen Eastmond