[XeTeX] Ideal way to handle fonts

[William Adams]

Okay, I've been doing some further testing and have some questions,  
and then some more questions.

  - how does the version of w32tex that's available on that web page  
match what's available in SVN?
  - could we get a marker or build number on that page or something  
to let us know when it's been up-dated?
  - I got three crashes in w32tex over the weekend, not really  
reproducible (seems to happen when I run successive calls to TeX on a  
file in WinTeXshell (doing this after editing the file to switch  
fonts) --- would someone want the Dr. Watson crash logs and memory  
dumps (the latter is ~14MB, so wants an FTP site to drop it off at)?
  - does the w32tex 0.994a binary have the fix to make \setromanfont 
{Aldus LT Std} work? ('cause it didn't).

Several more fonts didn't work correctly (or at all) and others  
exhibited unpredictable behaviour, so how do we want to handle this?

  - Antique Olive for instance set the light as the normal weight and  
the Compact for the bold --- do we want to try to extend or improve  
the handling of weights? Bauhaus performed similarly.

Also, W32tex (or is it XeTeX itself? or the underlying Windows OS?)  
doesn't handle spaces very well. I tried this (where the .tex file  
was named the same as the font I wished to test):

\documentclass{typespec}
\begin{document}
\specimenfour{\jobname} % this feeds into a \setromanfont{#1}
\end{document}

and it complained about not being able to find a file and balked at  
the space in the fontname.

For those who're curious, in addition to Aldus LT Std, the following  
fonts don't seem to've worked (in W32tex):

Ariadne LT Std --- would there be an easy way to pull in a font to  
use it for capitals only? (I guess this is another request for a  
virtual font feature)
Arnold Boecklin Std
Auriol LT Std
Banco Std
Banshee Std
Baskerville Cyrillic LT Std
Bauer Bodoni Std

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications



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