[Aleph] OpenType-to-TeX and other musings...

[Idris Samawi Hamid]

More musings:

Was just reading

http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2005/11/great_expectati.html

\startquote

Moving away from the fonts themselves, there's the question of "which  
applications support this stuff
[opentype], anyway?"

That's another complicated question. When you're talking advanced  
typography for western fonts, today it's mostly the Adobe Creative Suite  
applications (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop), plus some key Apple  
applications (Keynote, Pages and TextEdit, but only when run on Mac OS  
10.4 and later). Yes, we hear QuarkXPress will get there in the next  
version, and Microsoft Word is rumored to be working on support in the  
foreseeable future. Adobe also does some pretty cool stuff for Chinese,  
Japanese and Korean with OpenType, particularly in InDesign.

But if you're talking advanced language support for "complex scripts" such  
as Arabic and the Indic languages via OpenType, the positions are almost  
reversed. Microsoft Office and Publisher support this stuff nicely (though  
only on Windows), while Adobe applications generally don't support  
"complex scripts" at all. Our main exceptions are some added support in  
Acrobat 7.0.5 and later (for Hebrew, Arabic and Thai), and that there are  
separate "ME" (Middle Eastern) versions of many of our applications, which  
support Arabic and Hebrew.

One expects that eventually this will all level out. But end users quite  
reasonably don't want to hear about varying levels of application support,  
or what's "coming soon." They want it to "just work." But the reality is  
more complicated than that, and will remain so for some years yet.

\stopquote

Consider the last phrase, "and will remain so for some years yet". My  
point: with a concerted effort, TeX could conceivable beat both MS and  
Adobe to have the best support on every OS for their own format,  
OpenTypeFonts! The otp mechanism could provide the key. Maybe it needs to  
be gutted and rebuilt, but that is the key, I think.

Best
Idris

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