This place has been going rather quiet for the past 2 months, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on Ayeri—quite the opposite, in fact. While there hasn’t been much activity here on this blog, a lot more is currently going on at the Ayeri Grammar repository on the code-sharing site, GitHub.
I’ve been trying to add a few pages every day for the past 7 weeks so that I am currently at about 110 pages (examples and tables take up so much space!). Since the whole thing is quite a bit in flux, I don’t want to give a straight download link to the fully compiled document yet, but you can nonetheless take a look at everything I’ve written so far.
I updated my operating system to Ubuntu 15.04 ‘Vivid’ the other day and ran into trouble when I tried using my Tahano Hikamu font, Tagāti Book G. The issue was that XeLaTeX would ignore Graphite as the text rendering engine for this font in spite of my explicitly declaring it:
\newfontfamily{\Tagati}[
Renderer=Graphite,
...
]{Tagati Book G}
The result was that none of the diacritics were aligned correctly, since the font is not configured for OpenType to handle them:
a: Rendering as expected; b: Graphite ignored
After some research, it turned out that the bug is with the file fontspec-xetex.sty.[1. On my system, the path to the file is /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/fontspec/fontspec-xetex.sty, use kpsewhere fontspec-xetex.sty to find it, otherwise.] Ubuntu 15.04 still ships with TeXLive 2014, which includes version 2.4a of it as a part of the fontspec package. In this version, there is a typo in the definition for Graphite which apparently makes it inaccessible through the Renderer option. You can read up on it in the bug report on GitHub.
Changing fontspec-xetex.sty according to the bug report and saving it under my home directory’s TeX tree at ~/texmf/tex/latex/fontspec/ to not overwrite the original file solved the issue for me. Another way to solve the issue for the time being is to include a snippet of code in your TeX file’s preamble that basically redefines the respective function.
The issue is already fixed in the latest version of the fontspec package, also in the version that’s available from CTAN, so I hope there will be an update to the fontspec package in the official Ubuntu repositories as well sometime.
