[XeTeX] Re: Trouble with XeLaTeX and Jurabib

[Jonathan Kew]

On 6 Feb 2006, at 3:06 pm, Stuart Robertson wrote:

> Thank you Jonathan,
>
> I recognise the option from the documentation but didn't understand  
> what it did. Will this be the case also for Open Type fonts used  
> with XeLaTeX?
>

Yes.

It'll be the case for any "standard" text fonts, as opposed to "TeX"  
fonts where the replacement of -- and --- with en- and em-dash, `  
with open-quote, etc., is provided by the ligature program in the TFM  
file.

This was (as I understand it) DEK's way of dealing with the fact that  
typical computer keyboards (and 7-bit character encodings) didn't  
provide all the characters he wanted to use in typesetting: he used  
ligature rules in the fonts to access some extras, and replaced a few  
ASCII characters not used in normal text (like `, <, and >) with more  
typographically useful ones in his "text" font encoding. Standard  
fonts (outside the TeX world) don't implement these conventions, but  
the tex-text mapping provides a way for them to emulate the behavior  
you've come to expect.

JK