[XeTeX] "Hoefler Text" XeLaTeX interface

[Will Robertson]

On 4 Oct 2004, at 7:13 PM, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>
> For simpler cases, such as Palatino, I'm hoping we can make all this 
> work disappear. What I have in mind is adding features to XeTeX to 
> make it possible to discover the names of the style variants of a font 
> family, so that given the name "Palatino", for example, standard 
> macros could learn the correct names of the available styles. That's 
> the only thing that prevents auto-generation of the declarations in 
> your osxppl.fd file.

Certainly, that would make the whole thing a lot easier!
For now it's pretty easy to knock up some quick .fd files though. I'll 
keep your prediction in mind and not spend too much time on it.

> To some extent, even "standard" features such as Small Caps could be 
> auto-detected and supported, using the AAT/OT query primitives that 
> XeTeX already has. I'll probably have a go at writing such macros 
> sometime, if nobody else gets there first, but I'd like to get font 
> family discovery working first.

I looked in your AAT-info.tex macro, but I could only see how to get 
the actual name of the feature, not a standardised flag of what the 
feature actually is. So with Apple's naming scheme hopelessly 
ridiculous, I figured at present it wasn't possible (for me at least).

> Full support of rich fonts with unique features will still require 
> manually-constructed .fd files, I expect, but many of the simpler 
> cases should become virtually painless.

One of the problems for complex fonts is trying to squeeze everything 
in! Is there any way of applying a known feature to the already 
selected font? That would make things a lot easier for ligatures and so 
on.

At the moment I need a separate font family for literally almost every 
(if I choose to make them, which I don't) permutation of font feature 
choice. But if there was an XeTeX command I didn't know about that 
would do say:

   \font\f="Hoefler Text"
   \f
   text with normal ligatures

   \xetexchangefontfeature{"Ligatures = Rare\space Ligatures;"}
   text with rare ligatures

That would be fantastic. Is such a thing conceivable or in existence 
already?

Regards,
Will