[XeTeX] Re: A Zapfish request (was Re: [] XeTeX)

[William F. Adams]

Ross, do you mind my forwarding this on to the mactex list?

Let me know, or do it yourself in your response.

Thanks!

On Wednesday, April 14, 2004, at 03:13  AM, Ross Moore wrote:

> I've attached a PDF below.
> There are a few adjustments, to the font size, page-height etc.
> (Also, replaced Plaice + Haralambous with Kew :-)

Good point ;)

>>>> The ``the'' ligature _does_ get used, so there's that much of an 
>>>> improvement over Jaguar, but only when ``the'' occurs _within_ a 
>>>> line, not at the beginning.
>
> OK, I see that. How is it controlled ?
>   --- internally, by Apple or the font-renderer, of course.
> I tried putting all kinds of glue, penalties, \phantom, etc. on the 
> line,
> but to no effect, because these won't put anything into the PDF.

No, what happens is xetex passes a string to AAT which passes back a 
composed line --- that the ``the'' is at the beginning of a line is 
part of the information passed.

You could turn off the ``the'' ligature by grouping ``th{}e'' should 
work, or probably by putting \vbox{the}, but getting it at the 
beginning of a line is going to require something explicit --- perhaps 
``\noboundarychar{}the''? (assuming such a thing exists).

>> If nothing else, it'll be a faster way for me to try out alternate 
>> characters than clicking through TextEdit.app or InDesign's Glyph 
>> palette.
>
> Like an extended font-table ?
> What syntax would you use ?
>      \char<num>  with <num>  > 255
>      e.g. \char"xxx ?

That's a very good question.

I built a weird encoding to handle arbitrary up-to-three character 
combinations and alternates for my hack.

You'd probably need to pass in something to AAT via something like a 
\special mechanism.

William

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