[XeTeX] Change font metric?

[Will Robertson]

On 2009-11-09 20:25:12 +1030, Michiel Kamermans 
<pomax at nihongoresources.com> said:

> Hi Khaled,
>> Again, LuaTeX can actually do this, you can have a font feature file
>> (.fea) that, among other things, can define custom kerning table.
>> 
> As I was to understand it, LuaTeX was still pending an actual release?

Version 0.4-something is included in TeX Live 2009. It is not yet as 
stable as XeTeX, say, but looking from the outside I'd say it's safe to 
use (albeit with not much LaTeX support at this stage (see footnote)). 
If you're a TUG member you can read about it in the latest TUGboat:

  "LuaTEX: Halfway to version 1", Hans Hagen
  <https://www.tug.org/members/TUGboat/tb30-2/tb95hagen-luatex.pdf>

(Joining TUG is by far the best way to support the TeX community.)

>  (and as I was to understand it, but I might be mistaken here, the 
> choice to go with Lua means that it doesn't understand unicode text in 
> the same way standard LaTeX 2e doesn't, because of Lua's 8 bit clean 
> philosophy?)

No, LuaTeX accepts unicode input fine.

Will

Footnote: I've made very tentative steps to get fontspec working in 
LuaTeX but I don't have time to do it properly at the moment.