[XeTeX] More Math Fonts?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 25 Aug 2004, at 9:34 am, Will Robertson wrote:

> On 25 Aug 2004, at 5:45 PM, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>
>> There's your answer. The xdv2pdf driver doesn't support VFs.
>>
>> (And if it did, people would still get frustrated because the virtual 
>> fonts would often refer to "real" fonts that exist in PK or PFB 
>> forms....which CoreGraphics doesn't support.)
>
> The thing is that you've tricked people into thinking XeTeX is more 
> than it really is. If you'd said from the outset: "right, only 
> installed Mac OS X fonts are allowed" then you'd be fine. Of course, 
> people would complain about maths, and rightly so.

Yup. (Tricked? I've tried to be up-front about what XeTeX is, and 
acknowledged that the support for anything other than Unicode text and 
installed Unicode fonts is an add-on, secondary to the main focus of 
the project.)

Partly, we're facing the question of where to expend effort.... would 
it be more worthwhile to keep enhancing the support of legacy fonts and 
non-standard encodings, or to put the resources into developing 
standards-based, Unicode-compliant fonts and the necessary supporting 
macros, etc.?

>
>> I don't know what form the Fourier fonts take, so don't know what it 
>> would take to support them.
>
> They're PFB, so it couldn't be much harder than what you've done with 
> the CM fonts.

OK, so if we had .vf support (not all that hard to do, really), and if 
someone converted them from .pfb to .otf so that OS X could load them, 
it would be possible to make this work. It's all just a question of 
spending the time....

>> Every now and then, I consider starting this project, but it's hard 
>> to find the time.... "real work" gets in the way!
>
> Have you considered applying for a grant from TUG?
> If you're keen, that is. Then it could be real work!
>

You serious? I didn't know TUG had that kind of money.... :-)

Well, if someone were to offer to pay me to work on XeTeX, I'll admit 
that I'd give it serious consideration.

JK