[XeTeX] Re: XeTeX & Unicode vs. standard LaTeX

Jonathan Kew jonathan_kew at sil.org
Mon Oct 11 00:29:57 CEST 2004


On 10 Oct 2004, at 11:10 pm, Ross Moore wrote:

> However  utf8accents.sty  doesn't solve the ligature problems,
> which are of a quite different character (sic).
> That's why the following is such great news ...
>
>>> However, we obviously cannot expect mainstream font vendors to add 
>>> support for TeX's unique keying conventions to their font tables. 
>>> Therefore, I have just implemented a "font mapping" scheme (this was 
>>> first suggested on the XeTeX list by Ross Moore, IIRC), which allows 
>>> an arbitrary mapping of Unicode character sequences to be associated 
>>> with a particular font.
>>> .....
>>> This was just implemented on Friday, and seems to be working well. 
>>> It will be present in the next release of XeTeX (along with that 
>>> OpenType ligature bug-fix, and perhaps another feature or two). Stay 
>>> tuned! :-)
> .....
> I'd urge everyone to try this with some of your old documents,
> and report back to the list on special cases that are not being
> processed correctly.

Just in case this wasn't clear: you can't try the font mapping 
functionality quite yet (or if you do, it'll be very disappointing!), 
as I haven't posted an update yet. But I'm hoping to release a new 
build within the next day or two, and then you get to play with it.

The new version will also offer the ability to load the bold and italic 
faces of a font without prior knowledge of their exact names, making it 
possible to write truly "generic" font-family-loading macros for simple 
families. Thus, for example, I've written a \NewOSXFontFamily macro 
such that:
   \NewOSXFontFamily{palatino}{Palatino}
   \NewOSXFontFamily{times}{Times Roman}
can be used to set up all four faces of these families for LaTeX, 
despite the different naming patterns. Hope this will please the folks 
looking for "simplified" font management! (Complex cases with many 
different weights, etc., will still require additional .fd files to 
access all the possibilities.)

JK



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