[XeTeX] Polyglossia does not recognize greek fonts

[Jonathan Kew]

On 28 Feb 2009, at 18:15, Nikos Platis wrote:

> I am trying to use polyglossia with some of the "old" Microsoft fonts
> such as Georgia and Times New Roman for greek texts, and I receive the
> error message
>
> ! Package polyglossia Error:
> The current font does not contain the Greek script!
> Please define \greekfont with \newfontfamily.
>
> while it is certain that these fonts contain the Greek script.

Hmmmm, this is a bit misleading. The fonts do contain Greek  
characters, but do not have OpenType support for the Greek script.  
However, as Greek is a "simple" script, at least in its unaccented  
form or using precomposed accented characters, it can work OK without  
specific OpenType support....

>
> If I just skip all these errors, the pdf comes out correctly.

....as shown by the fact that the result is correct.

> Moreover,
> if I use \newfontfamily\greekfont{Georgia}(with \setmainfont{Georgia})
> the document also compiles without errors.

If you define \greekfont, then I guess polyglossia assumes you know  
what you're doing, and simply uses it. If you don't define this, then  
it attempts to turn on the appropriate OpenType behavior in your  
current font, finds that Greek isn't supported, and complains.

> I believe this should not be happening...

Yes, I agree. In other cases such as Arabic, the error would be more  
helpful, as a font that lacks OpenType Arabic support will not render  
correctly (even if it includes the characters -- yes, there are such  
fonts). But for "simple" scripts like Cyrillic or Greek, perhaps it  
would be better to just write a message to the log, rather than  
actually consider it an error.

François, what do you think?

JK