Yet another developmental release of Amiri font, this time featuring a, more or less, complete Quranic support, which fixes the last major issue with the font, and I think it is only a couple of more alpha releases before it is ready to enter beta stage.

Another developmental release of Amiri font, marking a major developmental milestone.

Amiri was developed using a novel, and natural, approach of separating dots from base of the glyph and treating them as diacritical marks (which what they really are), this allowed much more flexibility than the more conventional approach of treating the dot and its base as a whole.

In the early developmental stages things were fine, but as the need for more complex tasks surfaced, things were getting exponentially harder and harder and it become clear that OpenType is not ready for this kind of development, and in the last few months I've been hitting the limits of OpenType as spec'd as well as hitting bugs in almost all OpenType implementation, essentially tying my hands from using more advanced (but less tasted) parts of the spec.

So I, regrettably, decided to revert to more conventional and well tried OpenType techniques. As a side effect there is now a one to one mapping between characters and glyphs in its various contextual forms (I'm still avoiding ligatures like plague). This fixes a whole lot of bugs and allows the font to work with more OpenType implementation, on the other hand number of glyphs grew by a factor of 7 and file size got tripled.

With this new turn, the font is ready to move into beta stage, and next release is likely to be the last alpha.

Though v1.010 was promised to be the last release, I'm resuming work on the fonts, so here is a new beta of XITS fonts, featuring mainly support for right-to-left math which have been the main motivate behind the project, though never made it to any of the released versions (only supported by LuaTeX for now, more on that later).

First attempts of Arabic math typesetting. Using ConTeXt MkIV, LuaTeX and my experimental XITS Math font.

I was trying to change the math font used in plain TeX (as opposed to LaTeX or ConTeXt), but I didn't seem to find it documented any where, apparently it is so obvious for TeXperts to be even documented. Anyway, I figured it out and I'm documenting it here so I don't have to search it again.

Set font families 0-3 to the new font, as follows:
0: math text ("sin", "cos", numbers, etc.)
1: math italic ("x", "y", "z", etc. don't have to be italic at all e.g. Euler)
2: math symbols
3: math extensions
\textfont: normal size font
\scriptfont: font for sub/super script

It has been long since last time I posted here, and there has been many recent developments.

I started a project to for digitisation of the standard Arabic typeface developed and used by Al-Amiria printing in Cairo from around 20s to 70s of the last century that was widely used in other governmental printing houses as well. The project has been funded by TUG, see the google code page of the project for more details (and if you want to donate to the project ;).)

Scribus 1.3.5 (not released yet), has support for using TeX for text rendering via a special LaTeX frame.

I grabbed it from svn, built it, some quick configuration to use xelatex instead of pdflatex, and the result is the screenshot above :).

Now, I need to polish this and make a good configuration file for ArabXeTeX (that I'm using on top of XeTeX engine).