Mapping a Unicode range to another

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  • André G. Isaak
    André G. Isaak Posts: 634
    edited July 2017
    I stand corrected -- I was making an assumption based on the fact that Mac OS ships with neither syriac fonts nor keyboard layouts. However, a quick test in TextEdit seems to work (using microsoft's estrangelo edessa).

    André
  • Benjamin Steiner
    Benjamin Steiner Posts: 6
    edited July 2017
    I'm not clear on what the purpose of hebr{IWR ,SYR } in the above is, unless there is some tradition of writing syriac using hebrew characters of which I am not aware.
    I added hebr{IWR ,SYR } myself, the purpose was to try and make the Syriac substitutions work with Hebrew characters. I had already added the Hebrew unicode points to the Syriac glyphs, so typing Hebrew does create Syriac glyphs, but substitutions are never applied because of the Hebrew shaping engine ignoring <init><medi><fina> as explained by others (more knowledgeable than myself) above.

    According to this link, the culprit is not OS X.

    I can't read or write Syriac but I opened with Pages the .doc file provided by the link above, tried a few copy and paste and saw no bad word reordering.  Pages says that the fonts used by the word document are missing and uses a default. The missing fonts are Talada and Adiabene.  
    The culprit is not OSX, typing in Syriac works great in TextEdit. It's Word problem.
    Yes the .doc looks correct as it loads but as soon as you start editing and mixing with English words, it fails, inconsistent and strange behavior. Overall you can make it work if you have a whole paragraph with only Syriac but Word really does not treat Syriac correctly. In Hebrew it works without problem, a few Hebrew words in an English sentence and vice-versa, and TextEdit has no problems with either Syriac or Hebrew.
    This makes sense, even recently (2 years) Word for Mac still had serious problems with right to left/Hebrew in general, as surprising as that sounds.

  • Michel Boyer
    Michel Boyer Posts: 120
    edited July 2017
    I was making an assumption based on the fact that Mac OS ships with neither syriac fonts nor keyboard layouts. 
    I just checked on OS X Sierra (10.12.5) that the fallback font for Syriac is Noto.



     Cf Fonts included with macOS Sierra The fonts appear to be hidden In Frameworks Applications Support folders or at least in some Fontinfo folder there I can see that there are the files NotoSansSyriacEastern-Regular.ttf.D460_0.ATSD and NotoSansSyriacEastern-Regular.ttf.D460_0.fontinfo. 
  • Hmm. That's odd -- On my system (Also 10.12.5) I get the following:

  • Note that the Noto fonts *are* present on my system (in /Library/Application Support/Apple/Fonts/Language Support/); they simply don't seem to be used by the emoji & symbols palette.

    André
  • Michel Boyer
    Michel Boyer Posts: 120
    edited July 2017
    Odd indeed that the two (same) systems behave differently. You are right, the fonts are in the folder you mention. The files I had found are in the folder /system/library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/ATS.framework/Versions/A/Resources/FontInfo
  • Interestingly, if I open the word document you mentioned (in pages as you did), the text does display in Noto, so the fonts are available, but only for fallback purposes. On the other hand, if I open it in Word, nothing is displayed.

    André
  • Michel Boyer
    Michel Boyer Posts: 120
    edited July 2017
    I now installed Serto Jerusalem but not Estrangelo Talada. When I open the Word file with Pages, the information I seem to be given is that the replacement font is Helvetica; there is no mention of Noto (and Serto is not used as replacement).



    The pdf that is generated however contains NotoSansSyriacEastern listed explicitly.
  • John and Khaled have been providing the right answers here. The 'ccmp' feature can map glyphs into other glyphs, and should be processed in all shaping engines (certainly will be on Windows); but the application of 'init'/'medi'/'fina' features for Arabic-style cursive connection happens only in certain shaping engines based solely on Unicode characters. If you have Hebrew characters, the text will be processed in a Hebrew shaping engine that does not apply the 'init'/etc. features, and use of 'ccmp' will not change that.
  • One side question. How do the script specific rendering and script tag in lookups play together. In Indesign I'm under the impression that the script specific lookups are controlled by the user defined language and not by the characters in the text. 
  • Khaled Hosny
    Khaled Hosny Posts: 289
    The script should always be taken from the character properties (with special handling for characters that has “common” or “inherited” script). Unlike script, there is no reliable way to auto detect text language, so it has to be provided by the user (some application will fallback to current locale in case user input is not provided or not possible e.g. UI toolkits).
  • Benjamin Steiner
    Benjamin Steiner Posts: 6
    edited July 2017
    Quick info: Syriac fonts are here. Estrangelo Edessa is often used.
    Attached: Syriac keyboard layout for Mac I found somewhere, and one I modified to be identical to Hebrew (to copy to /Library/Keyboard Layouts).

    Word for Mac support for Syriac is seriously lacking: typing Syriac characters switches automatically to the default font NotoSansSyriacEastern, but Word is unable to display this font for some reason.



  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,206
    edited July 2017
    Georg:

    In Indesign I'm under the impression that the script specific lookups are controlled by the user defined language and not by the characters in the text. 

    No. The language system selection is controlled by user language tagging of text (where a match is possible), but script is determined by Unicode script property as with other shaping engines (but not necessarily consistent with other engines, because of lack of standardisation in OTL run segmentation). In InDesign, a higher level selection of layout engine can be made by the user choosing the World Ready Composer or the older composer, but the effect of this for complex scripts is simply to enable or disable shaping support.

  • Michel Boyer
    Michel Boyer Posts: 120
    edited July 2017
    [...]  typing Syriac characters switches automatically to the default font NotoSansSyriacEastern, but Word is unable to display this font for some reason.
    Noto on the mac is a fallback font: it is meant to display something when the font is missing, it is not meant for editing. You can't select it either in Pages or TextEdit. 

    On the other hand, I installed Noto Sans Syriac Estrangela that I got from the Noto Google fonts and it can be selected in mac applications (Pages, Keynote, TextEdit). I don't have Word on Sierra to check.
  • Noto on the mac is a fallback font: it is meant to display something when the font is missing, it is not meant for editing. You can't select it either in Pages or TextEdit. 
    That sounds strange to me... My impression is that a fallback font is a regular font. Also, Google describes Noto fonts as regular fonts meant to support many languages. No mention of "only for display".

    I can select and type with Noto Sans Syriac Eastern in TextEdit without problems. I think the problem is more likely to come from Word for Mac.

  • Michel Boyer
    Michel Boyer Posts: 120
    I can select and type with Noto Sans Syriac Eastern in TextEdit without problems. 

    You are right. The fact is that I generated a pdf from the Page file of which there is a grab above and I tried to copy the line displayed in Noto and paste it in TextEdit and got garbage but I now realize it was probably due to the fact that Noto was used as fallback, i.e.  to display a missing font. If I select Noto and save the pdf, it is properly generated. Sorry for the confusion.