[XeTeX] .otf files

[Yves Codet]

Le 17 août 04, à 16:14, Jonathan Kew a écrit :

Thanks for your reply.

> I'm not familiar with that package, but if the fonts are defined by 
> .mf sources, the easiest way to use them will be to run a "standard" 
> TeX system that works with .pk bitmaps, and can run Metafont to 
> generate these as needed. XeTeX does not handle bitmap fonts, and 
> creating outline fonts (e.g, .otf, .ttf, or .pfb that could then be 
> converted to ..otf by FontForge or FontLab) is not a simple task.

That's what I feared: creating an .otf font is no task for a mere user.

> Of course, if you really want to use both Archaic fonts and 
> Unicode-compliant AAT or OpenType fonts within a single document, this 
> may not help much. Unfortunately, trying to merge those two 
> worlds--the "old" world of text in custom 8-bit encodings and fonts in 
> mf/pk formats and the "new" world of Unicode data and Unicode-encoded 
> AAT/OT fonts--is not simple or transparent. XeTeX has its roots firmly 
> on the Unicode side of the fence.

I understand, but some of us will have a difficulty, which doesn't 
pertain to XeTeX, but to Unicode. I was rewriting lessons on Greek and 
Latin historical linguistics when I heard of XeTeX, and it was a very 
good thing for me since I don't have anymore to decipher my source 
files, which contained things like this:
	*d\textipa{\r*m}n$h_2$\textipa{\r*n}ti
Not very easy to read. But when I came to a chapter about the history 
of Greek and Latin alphabets, I met the problem which motivated my 
question. I think Phoenician is a good example. I read somewhere that 
some specialists consider that there's only one north-western Semitic 
alphabet, which can be represented by Hebrew, and that there's no need 
to encode Phoenician separately. It seems quite sensible and Unicode 
people might well subscribe to this view. But what if one needs to 
*show* Phoenician letters? If the text is meant to be printed or 
distributed as PDF, the old TeX is a solution, as you suggest. 
Otherwise I thought of no better way than creating pictures (perhaps 
with a tex-to-html tool), though I'm rather scared at the idea of 
filling a LaTeX table with pictures (like twenty five \includegraphics 
for each table, and as I never did that I'm not sure it can work). I 
also planned to make an XML version of those lessons, and for that 
version I guess there's no other way than to use pictures.

Though this not XeTeX's problem, it may be a problem for some of its 
users. If you know of a better solution than what I tried and described 
above, it would be a great help.

Kind regards,

Yves