Thanks for the diagnosis, Khaled. I'm dealing with this at the moment by manually changing font when i begin an LTR embedding to turn off the 'Script=Arabic' option. That seems to workaround the problem for me. --scott
On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 3:48 AM, Khaled Hosny <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 05:43:10PM -0500, C. Scott Ananian wrote: >> Now both final lines display as "24) April .(2008". That is, the >> parentheses and period have been reordered, even when I explicitly >> request LTR mode. What's going on here? How do I turn this >> (mis)feature off? > > That seems to be an effect of using an Arabic (Script=Arabic) font, a > minimal LaTeX file to demonstrate this, though I can’t immediately > explain why it is happening, though: > > \documentclass{minimal} > \usepackage{fontspec} > \begin{document} > \fontspec[Script=Arabic]{Amiri} > Williams، Richard (24 April 2008). > \end{document} > > In your poliglossia example, this is a result of calling > \defaultlanguage{arabic} which will use \arabicfont as the main document > font (which is not something you want for non-Arabic text anyway, notice > the different period you get with Amiri when script is set to Arabic). > > An even more minimal, Plain file can demonstrate this, so it is an > engine issue: > > \font\amiri="Amiri"\amiri > Williams، Richard (24 April 2008). > > \font\amiri="Amiri:script=arab"\amiri > Williams، Richard (24 April 2008). > \bye > > My wild guess is that, based on the “arab” script, we consider runs like > “(24” and “2008)” that do not have any characters with strong > directionality to have a right to left base direction, so the > parenthesis end up moved to the other side. > > Minutes later: I checked the code and this indeed the case, I dodn’t > know why this was done, but has been like that since the first XeTeX > commit I can track. > > One ugly workaround for this specific is to use no break space inside > the parenthesis, so it ends up processed as one “word”, but you loose > the ability to break line here of course. > > \font\amiri="Amiri:script=arab"\amiri > Williams، Richard (24 April 2008). > \bye > > Regards, > Khaled > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
