[XeTeX] Arabic and line spacing
Stephen Moye
stephenmoye at mac.com
Sat Jun 4 12:19:52 CEST 2005
On Friday, June 03, 2005, at 11:40PM, Musa Furber <musaf at runbox.com> wrote:
>On Jun 3, 2005, at 5:44 PM, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>
>> On 3 Jun 2005, at 3:39 pm, Musa Furber wrote:
>>
>>> The line height between lines of Arabic text always a bit large. Is
>>> there any way to reduce this? I have tried
>>> \fontsize{point-size}{on-line-size}\selectfont, but it doesn't change
>>> anything.
>>>
>>> Any ideas?
>>
>> In plain TeX terms, you need to override \lineskiplimit so as to allow
>> the nominal height and depth of adjacent lines to overlap slightly, as
>> the ascent and descent metrics of most Arabic fonts are such that
>> otherwise you get quite generous spacing.
>>
>> Not being much of a LaTeX user, I don't know what the appropriate
>> LaTeX idiom would be, but I expect one of the experts here can help.
>
>I created three LaTeX files where I make a novice's attempt to change
>the leading with Times. There is one file for pdfLaTeX, another for
>XeLaTeX loading fonts with fontspec, and another for XeLaTeX using NFSS
>(\DeclareFont...).
>
>The pdfLaTeX and XeLaTex/NFSS versions show a slight change in leading.
>
>The XeLaTeX/fontspec leading remains constant. Is this something that
>should be changed in Will's wonderful fontspec?
>
>I wasn't able to produce an example where leading is small enough that
>consecutive lines start to overlap - something that will be useful to
>compensate for the x-height of Arabic without vowels.
>
>Regards,
>Musa
I looked at your samples and what you did not do is follow JK's advice about \lineskiplimit.
Somewhere in the preamble of your document you must type something like \lineskiplimit=-20pt (or whatever negative figure works for you).
This works -- I tried it in your samples.
HTH
Stephen Moye
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