[XeTeX] \beginL and colour

[Jonathan Kew]

On 15 Nov 2004, at 9:42 am, Hans Hagen wrote:

> Jonathan Kew wrote:
>
>> Incidentally, I'm wondering if I should loosen up the font name 
>> parsing to allow colon and semicolon to be interchangeable, so that 
>> you could always add ":ATTRIBUTE" at the end of an existing font 
>> spec, without having to worry whether this is the first attribute 
>> being added to a raw font name.
>
> that makes sense, since then one can construct macro bases color 
> definitions on fonts; how frozen is this info? i can imagine that the 
> color assignment can be done outside the font mechanism (e.g. on the 
> current font);
>
> \font\somefont=":ATTRIBUTE:..."
>

That's an interesting idea; in effect, it would be shorthand for some 
fancy macros that retrieve \fontname, parse it to extract the 
name+attributes and size, append a new attribute, and define a new 
\font. Right?

(I imagine that could simplify things internally for Will's fontspec 
package, too.)

I'll think about it and see if it seems feasible and robust.

JK