[XeTeX] Fontspec V3+ (was : fontspec manual 10.17 (scripts/languages))

[Khaled Hosny]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 10:57:45AM +0100, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
> 
> David Perry wrote: (concerning the current version of Fontspec :
> full text at-end)
> 
> and I left the message flagged for attention because there were
> points raised in it that suggested that at present, Fontspec may
> be adopting a sub-optimal approach in some cases.  In particular,
> David wrote :
> 
> >At first I told him to include
> >
> >\fontspec[Script=Devanagari]{Devanagari MT}
> >
> >but later realized that's only for OT. The second paragraph of 10.17
> >does mention this, but a footnote or parenthetical remark ("Don't do
> >this with AAT fonts!") might save people like me who work almost
> >exclusively with OT from making silly mistakes.
> 
> In an ideal world, would not the syntax requirws for OT, AAT, and any
> other format font, be identical, and should it not be the responsibility
> of the font-handling package (Fontspec, in this case) to convert the
> universal syntax to the particular syntax needed by the actual
> instance of the font found ?  If others agree that this is desirable,
> I wonder whether I might be permitted to raise it as a requested
> feature for a future major release of Fontspec ?

AAT fonts has no notion of scripts and languages, feature tags etc. It
is a completely different world, IMO it is not possible to have a
"universal syntax" (there are also graphite fonts) without losing
format specific functionality.

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer