Pre-processing Arabic text Just a quick example of colouring Arabic glyphs via the XeTeX engine (XeLaTeX) using a pre-processor written in C (via FreeType and libotf). The glyph paths were obtained via FreeType and written out as TeX files that…
A very short post I’ve been reading about SIL International’s Graphite engine and it looks really interesting. I downloaded the code and ran the CMake-based build process through the CMake graphical interface. It didn’t work. Eventually, I found some instructions…
Introduction In a previous post I promised to write a short introduction to libotf; however, before discussing libotf I need to “set the scene” and write something about logical vs display (visual) order and “shaping engines”. This post covers a…
Introduction I’ve been thinking about the next article in this series and what should it address so I’ve decided to skip ahead and give a summary of the documentation, tools and libraries which made it possible for me to experiment…
If you want to explore passing UTF-8 string data to/from LuaTeX to your C code/library you may want to convert the UTF-8 data back into Unicode code points (reversing the UTF-8 encoding process discussed in this post). To do that…
As you read about OpenType fonts and Unicode you come across terms such as “Glyph IDs”, Unicode characters/code points and suchlike. And this can be a bit puzzling: what’s the relationship between them? In this post I’ll try to give…