Re: XeTeX encoding problem

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> Well, they *could* be.  We could choose a font with CJK support and
>> make the definitions in texinfo.tex just as we define existing
>> chars.  In principle it is possible to make definitions for any and
>> all Unicode characters in texinfo.tex.  -k
> 
> I believe there would be complications. If one character is defined
> to {\arabicfont A} and another to {\arabicfont B}, then with
> {\arabicfont A}{\arabicfont B}, I believe there wouldn't be proper
> ligaturization between the two characters.  Also with TeX each font
> can only have 256 glyphs.  I believe the CJK package for LaTeX deals
> with this problem.

My CJK package heavily relies on the LaTeX font selection, and I doubt
that this gets ported to texinfo.  If I had to do it, I would refuse
it since it is an obsolete technique not really adequate to write
documents having a CJK script as the main script.  And the solutions
of the CJK package completely fail for other scripts like Arabic,
Devenagari, etc., due to ligatures, as you correctly state.

Instead, I would like to have the ucharclasses style file (for XeTeX)
ported to texinfo (also part of TeXLive, BTW).

  https://github.com/Pomax/ucharclasses

It should also be ported to luatex so that Unicode blocks
automatically access associated fonts.

But this is the future.  Right now, I favor a simple solution, namely
native UTF8 support using the CM super fonts, even if there are
missing characters (which ones, BTW?).  I guess this covers 99% of the
current need.


    Werner