[XeTeX] Mac OS X Savoye

[Jonathan Kew]

On 27 Nov 2005, at 10:02 pm, Stephen Moye wrote:

> There is an interesting query on comp.text.tex.  It seems that the  
> OS X font 'Savoye LET Plain:1.0' has a colon in it and this is not  
> allowing XeTeX to find the font:
>
> !Font \test=Savoye LET Plain:1 at 20.0pt not loadable: ATSUI font  
> not found.
>
> I assume that the colon is getting in the way of how stylistic  
> alternatives are chosen in XeTeX. No amount of cajoling seems to  
> work for this font. Any suggestions?

Ugh -- I've never seen an actual font name with a colon in it! (Or  
period, I think.) Both of those may present problems.

The "1.0" looks suspiciously like a version number, which shouldn't  
normally be included in a font name; there's a separate field for  
version information in the fonts. So (assuming this is indeed version  
information, not really part of the actual name, conceptually), one  
could argue that the font is incorrect.

However, that doesn't solve the immediate problem. I can't think of  
any way you'd currently be able to get XeTeX to load this font; it  
regards a colon as terminating the name and anything following as  
being feature specifications. I suppose I could consider ways of  
working around this. A couple of possibilities occur to me offhand:

* allow the characters recognized when parsing a font descriptor into  
name and features to be set by the user within the document:
     \XeTeXfontfeaturedelimiter = <char-number>	[default is ":"]
     \XeTeXfontstyledelimiter = <char-number>	[default is "/"]

* provide a \XeTeXfont command that splits things up into separate  
arguments with keywords identifying the pieces, e.g,
     \XeTeXfont\myfontid = "Font name" style "B" features  
"feature=setting;..." at 12pt

Here, the "font name" would be used directly, without any parsing for  
style/feature information.

However, I'm not promising this right now.... just thinking aloud.  
Suggestions are welcome.

JK