[XeTeX] Copy and paste of oldstyle numbers of the latin modern font

[Jonathan Kew]

On 6 May 2008, at 1:05 pm, William Adams wrote:

> On May 6, 2008, at 6:16 AM, Ulrike Fischer wrote:
>
>> Am Tue, 6 May 2008 11:34:38 +0200 schrieb Peter Dyballa:
>>
>>> Am 06.05.2008 um 10:29 schrieb Ulrike Fischer:
>>>
>>>> And a good solution would need some action at the xetex/xdvipdfmx
>>>> level.
>>>
>>>
>>> There is no good solution possible because OSF are not part of
>>> Unicode. They are a feature of a few fonts – at different places/ 
>>> code
>>> points. Best would be to map them to regular digits ...
>>
>> Yes, exactly. That's what I want. But how do I map them to regular
>> digits?
>
>
> One wonders if perhaps a TrueType (Font) Collection could be adapted
> to such.


It would help if font developers refrain from encoding OSF and  
similar glyph variants in the Private Use Area. These glyphs should  
NOT be encoded at arbitrary "Unicode" values, they should be left  
unencoded and accessed via OpenType layout features. If such glyphs  
have Adobe-conformant names that reflect the underlying Unicode  
value, with a suffix to indicate the particular variant (e.g.,  
"one.oldstyle"), there's a chance that software will be able to  
recover the proper Unicode characters from the glyph stream.

As long as font vendors persist in encoding these glyphs in the PUA,  
you can expect to get (nearly-useless) PUA text back out.

JK