[XeTeX] [OT] Free fonts for fontspec examples?

Will Robertson wspr81 at gmail.com
Wed Jul 14 09:02:15 CEST 2010


On 2010-07-14 12:38:56 +0930, Alexey Kryukov 
<anagnost at yandex.ru> said:

> On Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0930
> Will Robertson wrote:
> 
>> Why? If they are "historical forms" isn't it better to give them a
>> meaningful OpenType feature name?
> 
> To my mind, an attempt to provide meaningful feature names for every
> possible situation was a key mistake of the OpenType standard. It is
> especially clear in case of historical forms, because it is difficult
> to describe the huge number of possible glyph/character variations with
> just one or two predefined tags.

Okay, I can concede that "hist" is a case with fuzzy edges. Still, 
surely you're not arguing against having features like onum/lnum!

If a certain style of variation recurs consistently in multiple fonts, 
it only seems sensible to me to have a standard OpenType feature to tie 
them all together.

> As for meaningful names, it's no longer a problem, as the OT
> specification currently allows to assign a friendly name (it even
> can be localized) to each stylistic set.

But these aren't useful for the XeTeX user. AAT font features are 
referred to by name, but inconsistencies between fonts meant it was a 
nightmare to use them in XeTeX; one of the original advantages of 
fontspec was to provide consistency here so you didn't need to remember 
multiple ways to write "Numbers=OldStyle".

Will




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