Spacing using Awami Nastaliq

[Malachi James]

Certain words, when typed in Urdu with Awami Nastaliq, lose the space between them.

The the attached files for an example involving the words تو چاروں

Awami is still in development and is a bit unusual in that it is Graphite-only. It's a bit hard in cases like this to know what it's a font problem and when it's a program problem, but these words do get spaced correctly in many other programs, including LibreOffice. Also, those this is a single example this sort of spacing problem is not uncommon when using SILE and Awami.

Any ideas how this might be fixed? Is it a SILE-side problem or an Awami-side problem? If Awami, are there specific fixes that I could go back to the developer with?

Thank you,

Malachi

[Simon Cozens]

On 17/01/2019 07:49, Malachi James wrote:
> Certain words, when typed in Urdu with Awami Nastaliq, lose the space
> between them.

I've had a look at this and it seems to be working on my end, using SILE
0.9.5.1 (the latest release) and the following versions:

Harfbuzz version: 2.3.0
Shapers enabled: graphite2, ot, coretext, coretext_aat, fallback
ICU support enabled

Fonts used:
/Users/simon/Library/Fonts/Scheherazade-R.ttf:0 Version 2.020 (build
602/603)
/Users/simon/Library/Fonts/GentiumPlus-R.ttf:0 Version 1.508; 2011;
Maintenance release
/Users/simon/Library/Fonts/AwamiNastaliq-Regular.ttf:0 Version 1.000

I've attached the PDF output I get.

If you're not using the latest release, you might find this information
useful in the release notes:

* You can now set the stretch and shrink values of a space using the
`shaper.spaceenlargementfactor`, `shaper.spaceshrinkfactor` and
`shaper.spacestretchfactor` settings.

Simon

[Malachi James]

Thank you!

After about 3 hours of building dependencies from source.. and re-building... and re-building, it at last works. I suspect the final problem was that harfbuzz had been built without ICU support, though I still can't verify that it has it. But regardless, it's working now.

--Malachi