[XeTeX] detection of absent characters within a font

Adam Lindsay atl at comp.lancs.ac.uk
Thu Nov 11 16:28:44 CET 2004


Hans Hagen said this at Thu, 11 Nov 2004 15:35:59 +0100:

>Adam Lindsay wrote:
>> The first was detecting whether or not a character is present in the
>> current font. I tried checking the width of a scratchbox with the
>> character, but it *doesn't* have zero width when the font is missing that
>> character, in my tests this morning. (No, for this application, I'm not
>> too fussed about combining diacriticals.)
>> 
>> Widths didn't work. Is there any other indicator that a character is
>> missing in action?
>
>take a look at the etex manual, there are \fontchar* and \iffontchar
>primitives

Ooh, interesting. I hadn't known those before. 
But... neither they nor your \doiffontcharelse (most of what I want!) is
working for me in XeTeX. Any character (well, out of the half-dozen
obscure ones that I know aren't represented in the fonts) I pass in is
seen as valid!

Jonathan: a bug or a not-yet-implemented feature?

(This is to tap into the rich catalogue of symbols available in Unicode,
which are mostly concentrated in three fonts in Mac OS X, but might be
available in the current font as well.)

adam
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 Adam T. Lindsay, Computing Dept.     atl at comp.lancs.ac.uk
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