[XeTeX] Font sizes in footnotes, and dashes

Jonathan Kew jonathan_kew at sil.org
Fri May 20 14:26:36 CEST 2005


On 20 May 2005, at 1:07 pm, Tara Andrews wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am a newcomer to XeTeX and to TeX in general; so far it has proven 
> to be exactly what I was looking for before I made my long-overdue 
> switch to LaTeX.  I have two problems remaining that I've been unable 
> to figure out, and am hoping someone on this list can help.
>
> The first is to do with font sizes.  I have the following commands 
> defined:
> \usepackage{fontspec}
> \font\armfont="Mshtakan"
> \def\arm#1{{\armfont #1}}
>
> which work fine for the body text.  When I want to have Armenian text 
> within a footnote, e.g.
> \footnote{The number 471 is rendered in Armenian as \arm{XXX} ...}
> % in the real source, I have Armenian characters in the place of XXX.
>
> Using the \arm command here causes the Armenian text to be the same 
> size as the body text, rather than the same size as the footnote text. 
>  I am unsure how best to get the Armenian text size to scale down to 
> the default footnote size.

\font\armfont=.... is a basic TeX font-loading command that will load 
the given font at one specific size (10pt, by default, in the absence 
of "...at <size>").

In LaTeX, using the fontspec package, a more appropriate thing to do 
would be:

	\newfontinstance\armfont{Mshtakan}
	\newcommand[1]{\arm}{{\armfont #1}}

which creates a command that will select this font at the current size, 
whatever that may be. See the fontspec documentation for more details; 
e.g., you could add a scaling factor if this makes the Armenian blend 
better with the main text font surrounding it.

(I hope my \newcommand is correct here, I don't normally write LaTeX.)

> The second problem is that when I use UTF-8 em-dashes, word separation 
> becomes confused.  Is there any way to let the relevant program (be it 
> XeTeX, TeX, or whatever) know that it is okay to split a word on the 
> em-dash, and that a hyphen is not needed?

If you have literal em-dashes in your text, you could make these 
"active characters" that permit a break after themselves; something 
like this should do it:

	\catcode"2014=\active
	\def^^^^2014{\char"2014\penalty0\relax}

HTH,

Jonathan



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