[XeTeX] "Hoefler Text" XeLaTeX interface

[Jonathan Kew]

On 4 Oct 2004, at 10:24 am, Will Robertson wrote:

> On 4 Oct 2004, at 6:45 PM, Bruno Voisin wrote:
>
>> Great work. I don't have time to test, unfortunately, but it looks 
>> like it will make the font selection experience much simpler than my 
>> time-consuming manual font declarations.
>> ...
>> Or was it some kind of adaptation of fontinst to AAT/OpenType and 
>> XeLaTeX?
>
> Ha ha ha! I wish. No, all manual labour very much inspired by your 
> many posted examples. Luckily, there are only a few fonts that complex 
> (I don't want to think about Zapfino!) so for most fonts it's fairly 
> straightforward. There's no point us all writing these awful .fd 
> files, so hopefully I can get the ball rolling by doing a fair few of 
> them.
>

For simpler cases, such as Palatino, I'm hoping we can make all this 
work disappear. What I have in mind is adding features to XeTeX to make 
it possible to discover the names of the style variants of a font 
family, so that given the name "Palatino", for example, standard macros 
could learn the correct names of the available styles. That's the only 
thing that prevents auto-generation of the declarations in your 
osxppl.fd file.

To some extent, even "standard" features such as Small Caps could be 
auto-detected and supported, using the AAT/OT query primitives that 
XeTeX already has. I'll probably have a go at writing such macros 
sometime, if nobody else gets there first, but I'd like to get font 
family discovery working first.

Full support of rich fonts with unique features will still require 
manually-constructed .fd files, I expect, but many of the simpler cases 
should become virtually painless.

JK