[XeTeX] XeTeX 0.8 available -- now with OpenType support :-)

[Somadevah at aol.com]

Dear Jonathan Kew,

Thanks for your very helpful remarks. 

The
> "normal" way to get an 'a' with macron would be to directly use the
> Unicode character U+0101, '〓', in the document. (Or the sequence <0061,
> 0304>.) This should work with any Unicode-compliant font that supports
> this character.
> 
Yes that much is clear to me, and it works fine for Unicode fonts with many 
glyphs (such as your Gentium). However it would be nice if I were able to use 
Adobe OT fonts which do not have all of the composite diacritic characters used 
for transliterating Indian languages ready made. In my old Textures setup 
this was easy, once I had generated the metrics of various Adobe type 1 fonts 
with edmetrics it was possible to do some simple catcode redefinitions such as: 

\catcode`\†=\active\def†{\d{t}}    %typed option t becomes t with underdot

and then use a screen font that used these conventions. These would then be 
aplied to any type 1 font. The same was possible with LaTeX inputenc. Thanks to 
your examples it seems to me now that it should be possible to do this again 
*provided* that XeTeX permits this catcode redefinition.

> It seems that the AAT tables in the font don't actually access this
> glyph. There's a font feature "Conjuncts=Additional Conjuncts" that you
> can turn on in Devanagari MT, but when I try this I *still* don't get
> that ligature. This would be a question for the font people at Apple, I
> guess.
> 
To my surprise I now see that an OT font called "Sanskrit 2003" does produce 
this ligature if you add :script=deva. It is a fairly ugly typeface however 
(is it utf-16?). 

> (In XeTeX, if you *really* want to see the glyph, you could produce it
> with "\XeTeXglyph 279", or 281 if you prefer the alternate glyph shape,
> but that's absolutely not how you want to be encoding documents, and
> it's dependent on the exact version of the font that you have; the
> glyph ID may not stay constant across different versions.)
> 
> 
Yes, this might be a temporary solution.


> Somadeva
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