[tex-live] XeTeX Complete Success

[Richard Koch]

Folks,

If you have been following this thread, you know that we wrote a script to test all fonts
in XeTeX which are shipped by Apple in Yosemite. A typical entry in this script was

	\font\ha=“Helvetica”
	\ha

	ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

	abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

	1234567890

Apple shipped 215 fonts, and we discovered that 18 were broken.

However, this isn’t the full story because most of these fonts have variant forms. 
For instance, Helvetica is listed in Apple’s Font Book with variants

	Light
	Light Oblique
	Oblique
	Bold
	Bold Oblique

To test, say, the Bold variant, the first line of the previous test should have been

	\font\ha=“Helvetica-Bold”

The number of tests would increase to around 1000. Perhaps someone would
like to expand the test to the full list of variants.

Many of these variants worked fine. However, the Kohlinoor Devangari font has
five variants and only the first worked. This bug was reported by users who have
been anxious to use the font for some time.

JIANG JIANG HAS JUST FIXED THIS PROBLEM. 

All five variants of Kohlinoor Devanagari now work. Moreover, the Jiang Jiang fix
also fixes two fonts that up to now had been broken, so at this moment, as far
as I know, the story is that all variants work and all but two fonts work, both
Bitmapped Fonts. The only fonts that fail are GB18030 Bitmap and Apple Color
Emoji. As I understand it, bitmapped fonts aren’t supported by XeTeX, and how
many such fonts are even used nowadays?

This wasn’t a trivial fix; Jiang Jiang had to request a change in the FreeType
library. 

I just rebuilt the Mac binaries, but this new development causes me to rebuild again.
If I work fast, the binaries should be available for Macs via the standard update mechanism
tomorrow.

I personally am amazed at the speed with which these bugs were fixed. When I got
into this game several days ago, I knew nothing about fonts. Since then, I’ve mainly
learned that fonts are very complicated gadgets. Enormous thanks to
Jiang Jiang and the others involved in this story.

Dick Koch