[XeTeX] XeLaTeX font selection

Will Robertson will at guerilla.net.au
Sun Oct 10 11:03:49 CEST 2004


On 9 Oct 2004, at 5:13 PM, Bruno Voisin wrote:
> <snip>

Having said what you have, it's still necessary to say that ones of the 
reasons XeTeX is better than TeX is the simple font stuff - no more 
messing with tfm or map files! But then when you say "Oh, and to use 
these fonts in LaTeX you need:" and insert a 20 line block of 
\DeclareFontShape commands, LaTeX users can be a little overwhelmed.

I think the defining point is that LaTeX run with XeTeX *cannot* use 
the myriad of fonts people are used to (with \usepackage{palatino}, 
etc.) including the Base 35 postscript fonts - so an alternative 
definitely needs to be implemented.

(I have defined a new encoding called OSX, so all these new XeTeX font 
selections can only be used if \usepackage[OSX]{fontenc} is used. But 
the NFSS is being used as is.)

> Similarly, regarding the font selection I think it would be better to 
> avoid defining too many new commands like \cfseries and \textcf, when 
> this can be avoided. For different variants of "bold", like semi-bold, 
> bold, bold extended, heavy, black, extra-black, ultra-black, I would 
> advocate using package options, like you did, for selecting one 
> variant as corresponding to the standard \bfseries and \textbf, once 
> and for good in a given document; just because people hear about 
> \textbf in the various LaTeX manuals around, and I'm afraid they will 
> become suspicious and uncomfortable when seeing commands like \textcf.

That's a very good suggestion!
I like it a lot. Just define everything low-level and let people use it 
as they themselves see fit. At least for now.

> On the other hand, for truly new combinations like bold italic, I also 
> do define at time a new command myself, like \textbi instead of 
> \textbf{\textit.
>
> All this may make no sense, I'm not a font specialist. I don't care 
> myself about differences between bold and bold extended, for example, 
> but I imagine typographers might perhaps want to use both in a given 
> document. If so, then please forget the above. And in any case it's 
> probably unwise for me to suggest things, given I won't have time to 
> contribute to the work itself.

No, I think what you've said is very pertinent and my thinking has been 
changed about what needs to be done.

> Perhaps a detailed inspection of the different packages available for 
> font selection in LaTeX (PSNFSS, PSNFSSX, eco, many more) could give 
> us hints on how the core LaTeX people have dealty with this problem. 
> It's not I'm all for standards: we're all using Macs, for example, not 
> Windows boxes (not to say I wouldn't be pleased at seeing Macs 
> becoming the standard, which I hope to see one day ;-)

The stuff in Philip Lehman's fontinstallationguide.pdf is basically 
providing all the info I am using to extend that which I need (robust 
methods for selecting lower case numbers, for example).

Thanks,
Will Robertson



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