[XeTeX] Patch: Add an entry for stemv

[Jonathan Kew]

On 4 Mar 2009, at 09:50, 高志明 wrote:

> Yes. But now, there are lots of fonts not built correctly which come  
> directly or indirectly from commercial font companies, especially  
> ones for Asia language. Although not useful or bad for correct  
> fonts, this patch may quickly bypass this legacy problem for many  
> important fonts. Sometimes, these widely used but ugly built fonts  
> are the only choice.

OK, I think I understand this point.

However, I am reluctant to add a feature at this level in xetex just  
for the purpose of working around broken font hints. If we add this to  
the xetex \font syntax, it will have to be supported "forever", for  
compatibility, and every font entry xetex ever creates and writes will  
have to include this additional value, just as a hack to work around  
some incorrect fonts. It also requires the user to be aware of the  
issue and to choose the appropriate value.

I'd like to suggest that a better approach is to have a configuration  
file for xdvipdfmx (probably separate from the main .cfg file) that  
simply lists font names and the stemv values you want to apply. This  
will allow you to "fix" the fonts at a more appropriate level --  
during the generation of the pdf -- without having to clutter the  
xetex input text with this; it will make it easy to apply the fix  
"globally" (as if you were fixing your installed copy of the font)  
rather than having to do it within every document; and we could even  
distribute such a configuration file with appropriate values for  
common fonts, so users don't have to know the "magic numbers" for  
better output, they'll get it automatically.

If others have an opinion on this too, I'll be happy to discuss  
further. But at the moment, my gut feeling is that a xetex-level font  
option is the wrong place to solve this, a driver setup file would be  
better (and also simpler, probably).

JK