<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.6000.16441" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY
style="WORD-WRAP: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space"
bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">Dear Jonathan</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">Many thanks for that quick response - I've
been conscious all along that there must be documentation and resource
files floating around that I've had trouble locating. I yearn
for the days of big fat bound instruction manuals! But the advice you've
given should be plenty to be going on with. I'll try to get to the
bottom of – and — in my input files not yielding true ens and ems. In
this experimental phase I'm just using Word's plain text format for input but I
realize I'll soon have to move over to a proper Unicode text editor, and perhaps
at least some of these glitches will disappear at that point.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">Best</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">John</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=jonathan_kew@sil.org href="mailto:jonathan_kew@sil.org">Jonathan
Kew</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=xetex@tug.org
href="mailto:xetex@tug.org">Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other
platforms</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Tuesday, May 29, 2007 11:06
AM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> JunkEmail: Re: [XeTeX] Ligatures
and things</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV><BR>
<DIV>
<DIV>On 29 May 2007, at 10:21 am, John Was wrote:</DIV><BR
class=Apple-interchange-newline>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">Hello all</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">I'm still experiencing some trouble with
XeTeX (run in plain TeX rather than LaTeX) and fonts on my Windows
system. When accessing fonts that show up normally in Windows
applications such as Word I find some of them work while others crash
XeTeX, without any obvious common factor. Not much of a worry since
the ones that do the crashing are not generally fonts that I want to
use anyway. In trying out the outline font Minion Pro (the
version that comes with Adobe Acrobat Reader, located in its Resource
directory), which I _would_ probably want to use, I find - as per an early
message of mine - that XeTeX crashes if I use the font name but not if I go
directly to the .otf font file using square brackets round the file
name. Again this doesn't much bother me (except that I'd like to know
why it happens!), <BR></FONT></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV><BR class=khtml-block-placeholder></DIV>
<DIV>I'd also like to know why this happens - it shouldn't!</DIV><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">but I've now found that although the five
standard ligatures are achieved automatically (ff, fi etc.), the en and em
dashes are not picked up either by the usual -- and --- or by explicitly
using an ASCII en or em dash in the input file (-- and --- just give double
and triple hyphens in the PDF, the true en and em dashes both give single
hyphens).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT><BR></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV><BR class=khtml-block-placeholder></DIV>
<DIV>This is correct; the use of hyphen-ligatures to produce en- and em-dashes
is a peculiarity of traditional TeX fonts, and you can't expect to find this
behavior in mainstream OpenType fonts. The expectation everywhere except TeX
is that if you want an em-dash, you use an em-dash character in the text (not
three hyphens).</DIV><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">Is there any way to make XeTeX see the
dashes automatically? I've just discovered that they don't work in
Times New Roman either, which is usually a pretty reliable font to test
things on. I have a nasty feeling that I'm going to have trouble with
quotation marks too!</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT><BR></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV><BR class=khtml-block-placeholder></DIV>
<DIV>So you are.</DIV>
<DIV><BR class=khtml-block-placeholder></DIV>
<DIV>However, there is a solution through XeTeX's "font-mapping" mechanism. If
you load fonts with the "tex-text" mapping file (included in the TL
installation), this will apply the "standard" TeX-style mappings to the
characters, replacing "---" with "—", etc.</DIV>
<DIV><BR class=khtml-block-placeholder></DIV>
<DIV>In plain TeX terms:</DIV>
<DIV> \font\tenrm = "Times New Roman:mapping=tex-text" at 10pt</DIV>
<DIV><BR class=khtml-block-placeholder></DIV>
<DIV>or in LaTeX terms:</DIV>
<DIV> \usepackage{fontspec}</DIV>
<DIV> \setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Times New Roman}</DIV>
<DIV><BR class=khtml-block-placeholder></DIV>
<DIV>etc.</DIV><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">Relatedly, is there some extended version
of testfont.tex that would generate a PDF of all the characters in a given
font? (The helpful PDF guide to XeTeX by Jonathan Kew in the TeXLive
distribution mentions a number of sample .TEX files that might be
of help here, but I can't find any of them, either in TeXLive or indeed
anywhere at all on the Internet: they have perhaps been withdrawn in the
current version.)</FONT></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><BR></DIV>
<DIV>There should be a (somewhat oldish) archive of sample files available on
the XeTeX web site (<A
href="http://scripts.sil.org/xetex">http://scripts.sil.org/xetex</A>); look on
the Downloads page. Many of these will use Mac OS X fonts, so you'll need to
change font names in order to run them on other platforms, but they may still
be instructive.</DIV>
<DIV><BR class=khtml-block-placeholder></DIV>JK<BR>
<DIV><BR class=khtml-block-placeholder></DIV>
<P>
<HR>
<P></P>_______________________________________________<BR>XeTeX mailing
list<BR>postmaster@tug.org<BR>http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex<BR></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>