[XeTeX] accessing fonts from TeX tree and glyphs without Unicode slot

[Will Robertson]

On 04/05/2006, at 22:19 , Adam Twardoch wrote:

> it was good to see you (and Jonathan!) in Bachotek!
>> - Is it possible to use OpenType fonts that reside in TeX tree  
>> instead
>> of having to install them to the system first? (There are dozens of
>> Latin Modern fonts for example that I never use otherwise.)

> I believe this is one of the feature requests that were suggested  
> here.
> It would be very useful if accessing fonts through pathnames were
> possible, like:
> \font\caslonsc = "D:\fontslib\Adobe\ACaslonPro-Regular.otf:+smcp"  
> at 16pt

As I recall you were complaining how it just doesn't make sense to  
have system-installed fonts when your collection has grown to many  
thousands. Unfortunately, most of us aren't in that situation :)

I prefer the idea of Jonathan's to have an extended syntax to access  
fonts, something along the lines of
   \XeTeXfont\caslonsc = "ACaslonPro-Regular" path "D:\fontslib\Adobe 
\" features "+smcp" at 16pt

If it were not too impossible (does dvipdfmx make things easier  
here?) I would strongly add my support for the path feature for one  
simple reason: default fonts. If we could provide a fontspec package  
add-on to load the OpenType Latin Modern fonts as default in LaTeX,  
it would solve a lot of "new user" confusion mistakes.

Alternatively, it doesn't seem unreasonable to distribute Gentium or  
something with XeTeX and pre-load that font in the format instead of  
the archaic CM...

Will