[XeTeX] Re: [MacTeX] Re: A Zapfish request (was Re: [] XeTeX)

[William F. Adams]

On Wednesday, April 14, 2004, at 02:24  PM, Jonathan Kew wrote:

>> Just out of curiousity Jonathan, have you considered supporting Omega 
>> Translation Processes? Doing so would be a pretty cool way to provide 
>> a facility to customize the usage for a given font (I'm gonna get 
>> pretty tired of always specifying ...r{}th in Zapfino (I think the rt 
>> ligature followed by an h (or pretty much any other letter) looks 
>> weird).
>
> No, I haven't. Well, I suppose you could say I've considered it; but I 
> don't want to go there.
>
> I'm not sure how this would play together with the fact that xetex is 
> dealing with sequences of Unicode characters, which it will ultimately 
> hand over to ATSUI for rendering. Would you expect OTPs to act at the 
> Unicode character level? If so, there's still a potentially complex 
> layer of behavior "underneath" this that you don't have full control 
> over. Or are you thinking that they'd map all the way to glyphs? 
> That's more the Omega way--but it's a whole different world-view from 
> xetex's, and I'm not sure how well they'd integrate.

I guess I should've noted, I'm just using OTPs to avoid the need for 
active characters or tricksy macro programming & other weird stuff, not 
for linguistics.

All I want is a way to contextually replace bar w/ \foo{^^^^ba40}, or 
in the case of Zapfino and xetex, something like baggage w/ ba{\b 
gg}age. (where \b is the command \font\b="Zapfino:Stylistic 
Variants=First variant glyph set" at 12pt from your previous missive)

> From an ATSUI point of view, it should really be the font designer who 
> decides, and then encodes in AAT tables, the appropriate contexts for 
> the rt ligature to be used. It should be extremely rare that a user 
> has reason to explicitly override the font designer's wishes. 
> (Apparently, in this particular case, you disagree with the font 
> developer's choice.)

Well, I am using an older version of the font, so to be fair, a number 
of things I'd want to do are done in more recent versions, e.g., the 
``the'' ligature which works mid-line in Panther but not at all in 
Jaguar (but I'm not having much success convincing work to upgrade to 
Panther).

However, after taking the time to put together a set of test files 
which encompass all extant digraphs (or tri or tetragraphs encompassing 
ligatures in Zapfino) in English (including the complete works of 
Shakespeare and the King James version of The Holy Bible), I think I've 
gotten something of a feel for what works and doesn't work in the way 
of letterpairs / alternates in Zapfino (mental note, must clean up 
notes and send to Adam Twardoch).

> Omega lets you take on this aspect of the font design task, by writing 
> custom OTPs to get the particular contextual behavior you want. The 
> equivalent in the xetex world would be to write custom AAT tables for 
> the font; that's what I'd probably do if I wanted Zapfino to behave 
> differently. (Of course, there may be licensing concerns with this; I 
> haven't looked into the question. But in principle, that's the way to 
> do it.)

Apple's license forbids modification or even decompiling / 
reverse-engineering so as to learn enough to implement in a fashion 
other than provided for by their APIs. That was one of the reasons for 
my Byzantine technique to make use of Zapfino using Omega.

> XeTeX was intended to make it simple to use the advanced typography 
> features of OS X, with no special setup required. I doubt it does 
> anything that you couldn't also do with Omega, in a 
> platform-independent manner, if you're prepared to put the effort into 
> it, and then you get to make all the decisions for yourself. If you 
> want that level of control, and have the expertise to do so, use 
> Omega. If you want to simply use AAT fonts as provided, XeTeX tries to 
> make it easy.

I've been there and done that (just need to finish writing up my 
experience). But, I'd like to avoid the need to generate 100MB .ps 
files for a small three page holiday card (that's the size of the 
intermediate file for peaceonearth).

I've been anxiously awaiting xetex for a long while, and am thrilled 
that it's finally available, please don't mistake my heady and feverish 
attempt at (what was meant to be) constructive criticism as 
disparagement.

If I've offended, I apologise.

At a minimum, I'm already finding your program as is very useful for 
testing out alternates for Zapfino (and I don't have to run it in a DOS 
box using Virtual PC....) and I'm very grateful it's available.

Thanks!

William

-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com

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