[XeTeX] More Math Fonts?

[Somadevah at aol.com]

>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.?

It seems to me that one of the reasons people will want to keep using legacy fonts is simply that most unicode fonts with large character sets are still quite ugly in print (arial unicode?). 


>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....

Would it maybe be possible to rather add direct support for human-readable .vpl files? This might make it easy to add LIG substitutes (and change kerning (KRN)). But, if that is something worth doing, I would much rather have a similar direct access to ATSUI or Opentype tables from inside XeTeX (is that conceivable?) 
All of this seems to me necessary not just because the Apple font tools to make ATSUI fonts are plain too abstruse for me. I would really like to be able to write Tex macros that access such features for only sections of text. For instance to force glyph substitution in certain lines to avoid hyphenation (something the Gutenberg Bible did but TeX still cannot do). I commonly see this in Sanskrit MSS from Gilgit and would like to be able to imitate this.

Somadeva Vasudeva
Wolfson College
Oxford OX2 6UD