[XeTeX] Re: Unicode/font mixing

[Will Robertson]

On 25 Jan 2005, at 10:14 PM, Jonathan Kew wrote:
> There have been requests in the past for a way to, in effect, declare 
> several "current fonts" each covering a different Unicode range, so 
> that mixed-script text wouldn't require explicit font changes. This is 
> an interesting possibility, but coming up with a design that would 
> reliably do "the right thing", especially with characters such as 
> punctuation or numerals that may be "shared" between scripts, is not a 
> trivial thing.

Do I remember that you once mentioned that this would be a big 
performance hit as well?

I think that we are thinking about this the wrong way. What we need 
instead is a tool which (temporarily?) merges fonts together.

So (in the XeTeX document itself if possible, but this would require 
trickery -- an external tool could work straight away), you specify a 
bunch of fonts, each adding their glyphs to the pool (-not- overwriting 
as they go) and end up with a final megafont. (As opposed to a metafont 
:))

In fact, surely fontforge at this very minute can at least do the 
glyphs -- but merging OpenType tables might be harder, I wouldn't know. 
(I wish I knew stuff.)

¿yesno?

W