[XeTeX] Question about emulated font features.

Jonathan Kew jonathan_kew at sil.org
Wed Dec 19 22:21:47 CET 2007


On 19 Dec 2007, at 8:46 pm, Michael B. Trausch wrote:

> First off, I want to say that I have absolutely been happy so far with
> my use of XeTeX, and it has filled a hole in what I have wanted out of
> the eTeX software that I have been using up until I found this.

Glad you like it! :)

> However, there is a slight issue that I have not with XeTeX, but with
> many of the fonts that I use:  They do not support OpenType  
> features, do
> not have variants for things like old-style numbers, small caps, etc.

Yes, this is true of many older fonts, especially those that that are  
simply repackaged versions of old Type 1 fonts.

> I was wondering if these font features can be emulated (of course  
> at the
> cost of appearance) in XeTeX/XeLaTeX, by XeTex itself, or if there  
> need
> to be some sort of complex macros developed in order to do it.

There is not currently any support (or any specific plans) for this  
within XeTeX; it aims to provide direct access to whatever the font  
offers, but does not "fake" things that the font lacks.

>   Also, I
> would be interested in emulating the slanted (not italic) letter  
> style;
> is this also possible?

There is support in XeTeX 0.997 (the development code in Subversion)  
for "slant" and "extend" pseudo-features; with this version,

   \font\sxcharis = "Charis SIL:slant=0.2;extend=1.5" at 12pt

will give a slanted, extended version of Charis SIL.

If you're running 0.996 (the TeX Live 2007 release version), this was  
not yet implemented at that time.

JK



More information about the XeTeX mailing list