[XeTeX] Re: Unicode/font mixing

[Simon Spiegel]

>> Hi,
>>
>> I already posted a similar question on the regular OSX LaTeX mailing
>> list, but I thought maybe a post here would be useful as well. To make
>> it short: Is it possible to have a font only for a certain part of the
>> Unicode encoding? Can I, for example, use Adobe Garamond Pro for the
>> Latin encodings, and Times Roman for Cyrillic and Hebrew? I know that
>> i can switch the fonts by hand, but can I setup XeLaTeX in a way that
>> it automatically switches to another font with more glyphs if the
>> first font isn't able to display everything?
>>
>
> No, there's no way to make this "magically" happen.
>
> If you insist on doing it, and don't mind (a) some tricky (and probably
> fragile) TeX macro programming, and (b) a performance hit, then you
> could write macros that switch fonts depending on the characters
> encountered, by making all text characters that aren't supported by the
> current font into "active character" macros that switch to an
> appropriate new font before typesetting themselves (and at the same
> time activate a new set of definitions, so that the font will change
> back again when needed).

Thank you for your answer. Maybe this is a naive question, but how are 
people supposed to deal with this sitation. I thought one of the main 
points of Unicode is that you don't have to change encoding all the 
time. If I have to manually change the used font, everytime I use a 
non-Latin glyph, I don't see much advantage? Or do I have just have 
restrict myself to the few fonts which support a great of Unicode 
glyphs if I want XeLaTeX to behave this way? One of the reason I'm 
asking this is because BibDesk is getting unicode support, which would 
allow me to enter non-Latin characters directly into bibTeX files 
(bibtex is kind of encoding agnostic). How are other people handling 
this situation?

Cheers

simon


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Simon Spiegel
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