[pdftex] opentype

[Thierry Bouche]

Concernant « Re: [pdftex] opentype », William Adams écrit : «
» 2 - pdfTeX's ability to do contextual character substitution (a la the
» URW HZ routine) to pad out a sparse line, or lighten a tight one
» indicates that it's got the possibility to make use of OpenType
» features

I'm afraid not. pdftex's font handling is tex's font handling, no less 
no more: it needs a TFM for each font used, and the TFM is the only
source for intelligent font handling, using a format lod by 20
years. The HZ feature hooks into the justification/line building
mechanism, it only changes fonts for one given line, nothing's
contectual in the sense of OT.

In fact, no tex flavour I know of is prepared to use a metric format
as OTF. Maybe it could have been one of the achievments of NTS
architecture: having different modules for font metrics allowing to
use natively various metrics formats.

» 3 - this sort of thing has been done before---SIL's nifty TeX/GX
» implementation. Sadly, Zapfino doesn't benefit from usage therein 'cause
» not very many of its 1,285 characters are wired up :(

dunno this. A full support of OT implies Omega + PDF + ...

-- 
Thierry Bouche