[XeTeX] Proper way to set up OT Features

Jonathan Kew jfkthame at googlemail.com
Tue Feb 15 08:06:42 CET 2011


On 15 Feb 2011, at 03:49, David J. Perry wrote:

> Will,
> 
> Thanks for the reply.  Having spent the larger part of Sunday testing on some additional machines, I can report the following.  All tests were conducted using the same exact font file (a PS-flavor OTF).  MiKTeX is kept updated.  If anybody has an idea about why the font works in XeLaTeX on Mac and Win7 but fails (in different ways) on the two Vista systems, I would really like to know.
> 
> Mac OS 10.6, MacTeX distribution:
> complete success with Mellel and TextEdit; mostly good with XeLaTeX (see below)
> 
> The one problem with XeLaTeX involved a feature (hist) in which I replaced a long s with a regular s if certain characters (comma, period, space, etc.) immediately followed the long s.  After seeing Khaled's message today I understand why this doesn't work.

Yes, you can't do lookups that involve <space>, because of how xetex handles word spacing.

> 
> Win7, MiKTeX 2.9
> mostly good with XeLaTex (same problem as above); Word 2010 failed with hlig and dlig, OK with liga and onum and pnum
> 
> WinVista SP1, MiKTeX 2.9
> as previously reported, no OT features except liga worked if implemented in the body of the document with \addfontfeatures; if implemented in the preamble as part of \setmainfont[]{}, everything worked.  Could not turn off liga with NoCommon.  Let me repeat: same exact font file as used for the previous two tests.  This is bizarre.
> 
> [disclaimer; I realize MiKTeX 2.9 officially requires SP2 on Vista.  This machine refuses to upgrade to SP2, so the test may not be completely valid. But I use XeLaTex on this machine frequently and other OT fonts such as Linux Libertine work correctly.]

The Windows version shouldn't affect font behavior in xetex, as it doesn't use the Windows font services.

> 
> WinVista SP2, MiKTeX 2.9
> Font generally seems OK with Word and OpenOffice Writer, although neither supports OT features so I can't test that aspect of things.  However, the font fails completely in XeLaTex; "Now" appears as "Opx".  Same exact font file, folks.  I already tried uninstalling and reinstalling MiKTeX; no improvement.  You can see why I am going crazy with this.

This almost certainly indicates the presence of two fonts with the same name (perhaps both OTF and PSType1 are present? or OTF and TTF?) in locations where xetex can find them; this leads to confusion.

JK




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