Unfortunately minority complex scripts have fallen on hard times between professional typesetting applications by large corporations as they increase efficiency. Because these companies tend to produce cross-platform applications, they have chosen to largely ignore the intelligent font handling of the respective platforms (ATSUI/OpenType-Uniscribe/OpenType-Pango) and substitute their own proprietary solutions. So even if minority complex scripts are handled by the OS...these high-end applications do not support that OS-level handling. Furthermore, there is insufficient economic incentive to implement proprietary solutions for complex minority scripts in their applications.
Hence it was with great delight during past couple weeks that I have discovered two fascinating desktop publishing applications: XeTeX v0.84 on Macintosh and UltraXML on Microsoft Windows. I've been able (using AAT and OpenType fonts of Khmer, respectively) to work in both. UltraXML v3.3 takes advantage of OpenType/Uniscribe in Windows (and can even extend intelligent font handling beyond that). It has a real-time graphic outcome update. However, it did not appear to know how to handle ZERO WIDTH SPACE for word wrap purposes and does not produce PDF directly. The price of one license is steep, to say the least: GB Pounds 2,400 (about US$4,400). http://www.webxsystems.com/UltraXML.htm Hence, my strong preference is XeTeX (pronounced: zeetek) because it is free (and generates PDF output directly). It does not have real-time graphic output update, however (it may take 30 seconds to run a tagged text file through the system and open the resulting PDF file). I'm quite hopeful that it will be relatively simple to pass other varieties of tagged text through style sheets set up for XeTeX. http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=xetex A recommended text editor for use with XeTex is TeXShop (http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html). TeXShop (unlike XeTeX) is affected by an ugly Apple TextEdit insertion bug. Comparatively speaking, XeTeX could leave you with spare cash to buy a few Macintoshes! Both of the above can be extended to facilitate custom intelligent font handling. Microsoft Publisher 2003 also handles Khmer publishing fairly well...but lacks baseline balancing, footnotes, and other sophisticated type handling features (and is totally dependent on the state of the art of Uniscribe). Hopefuly this news will help other individuals on these mailing lists who cherish minority complex scripts (and not offend the Unicode mailing list guardian angel, Sarasvati). Sincerely, Maurice
