[XeTeX] IM Fell Type and XeTeX

[Jonathan Kew]

On 10 Feb 2009, at 22:21, Pepe Romero wrote:

> Hello, I am testing in XeTeX the gorgeous Fell typefaces,  
> digitalized and issued freely by Igino Marini (http://iginomarini.com/fell/ 
> ). (Please do try them.)
> I have a problem, though. In XeTeX (latest TeX Live 2008) the  
> letters of the text appear typset one over another (as if there was  
> a kerning problem).
> When using other software (e.g., QuarkXPress) the text is typset ok.
> Any ideas?
> Romero


This is a problem that shows up when using OpenType/CFF fonts that do  
not use the normal 1000-unit emsquare that is traditional for  
PostScript outlines. If you view the PDF with an older version of  
Acrobat Reader (e.g., version 5 or even 7, I think) the text will  
display correctly, but Reader 8 disregards the font matrix entry and  
this results in mis-scaled glyphs.

I think that current versions of evince or other poppler-based viewers  
will also display correctly, but some older versions would have  
problems.

There has been some previous discussion of this, as there are a couple  
of recent Adobe fonts that show the same problem. I think it can  
reasonably be considered a bug in the PDF reader(s), especially given  
how the behavior has changed between releases of Adobe's products, but  
I don't know if they will change it again to restore the previous  
behavior.

Fixing it in xdvipdfmx would involve a change to how CFF fonts are  
handled; I'd be happy to accept a patch for this but have not had time  
to work on it myself.

If you try the TrueType version of the fonts, those should work fine.  
Despite what the web page says, it looks like these also include the  
OpenType layout features -- at least the one I looked at did.

JK