[XeTeX] xunicode.sty -- pinyin and TIPA shortcuts

[Will Robertson]

On 04/04/2006, at 13:24 , Robert Spence wrote:

> These are two "sorcerer's apprentice" type questions; I've only  
> been using XeTeX for a few days (---but what a wonderful few days  
> they've been!---), and I do hope I'm not guilty here of "rushing in  
> where angels fear to tread"...

I'm only qualified to answer the fontspec parts of your letter, since  
linguistics is quite outside of my field. Engineering and linguists  
don't tend to overlap too much!

> I had defined a colour called WSPRgreen (are those Will Robertson's  
> initials, by any chance?)

Only unofficially :) The "P" might be formally added one day, but I  
haven't got around to it.

> (BTW: the ability that fontspec.sty gives you to play around with  
> so many---usually fairly tasteless---combinations of all those  
> beautiful OSX system fonts makes me appreciate what an excellent  
> job GTA did in selecting the default combinations for gtamacfonts,  
> despite what one may or may not think about the best weight for  
> Gill Sans with Hoefler Text in koma-script-style section  
> headings... ;-)

Yes, the GTA fonts thing looks very useful, regardless of its  
legality. I'd eventually like to provide a fontspec interface to  
regular LaTeX with similar mechanisms, but I think it requires more  
resources than I can provide.

As far as combinations of fonts go, I've tended towards using  
variations of the same font as much as possible for single documents,  
and then you never have the problem of clashing styles! Quite few of  
the Mac OS X fonts look very good together, given the total number of  
combinations possible.

Regards,

Will