[XeTeX] fontspec v1.1

[Will Robertson]

On 18 Oct 2004, at 5:06 PM, Bruno Voisin wrote:
> - I am a bit surprised by the need to create a specific OSX encoding, 
> but that's mostly because I did not look at the issue into detail;

Well, it's not like I invented the encoding itself, just the name. 
After all, XeTeX uses unicode. The only advantage of using a separate 
encoding from Unknown is that we get a little osxenc.def file to play 
with. At the moment all it says is

> \ProvidesFile{osxenc.def}
> [2004/10/04 Encoding definition for Mac OS X fonts]
>
> \DeclareFontEncoding{OSX}%
>    {\newcommand\UTFencname{OSX}%
>    \RequirePackage{utf8accents}}{}
> % This is all that is declared since Ross Moore's utf8accents.sty
> % package supercedes the LaTeX functionality of \DeclareTextAccent,
> % \DeclareTextSymbol, etc. (I assume).
>
> \endinput

Whereas in the other encoding files it contains all of the commands 
that define accents and so on, which is what utf8accents does. Users 
shouldn't need to know about utf8accents as far as I'm concerned - all 
it does is make XeTeX behave as they expect. (When people switch 
encodings in LaTeX, they don't need to say \usepackage{t1accents}, for 
example.)

But I think the encoding matter should be sorted out as soon as 
possible so that we don't start proliferating files with an encoding 
name that may change in the future. As Ross says, there is nothing in 
the font definitions that would change if XeTeX was ported to another 
platform, so maybe my first choice of "OSX" as the encoding name was a 
bad bad idea.

Perhaps XU or XUCS would be a better idea --- "XeTeX Unicode", or 
something along those lines. Whom does one consult when creating new 
encoding names?

W