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

[Jonathan Kew]

On 11 Oct 2004, at 12:13 am, Will Robertson wrote:

>
> On 11 Oct 2004, at 7:59 AM, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>>
>> 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.)
>
> This is very exciting.
> Since this is a LaTeX-only feature, it might be a good idea to name 
> the command \NewLaTeXOSXFontFamily or some-such.

I wouldn't have thought there's any need for this, as it will be 
defined in a LaTeX .sty file or something like that; non-LaTeX users 
won't encounter it. (I'll provide an example macro, and leave you LaTeX 
people to figure out exactly how you want to integrate it with the 
other stuff you're doing for font management.)

The XeTeX extension underlying this macro is that you can simply add /B 
or /I or /BI to a font name, to ask XeTeX to load what Mac OS X 
considers to be the styled variant of the given font. And you can 
examine \fontname of the resulting TeX font to discover whether you 
actually got something different from the regular face. Thus,
	\font\x = "Times Roman/BI"
	\fontname\x
will give you "Times Bold Italic", while
	\font\x = "New York/I"
	\fontname\x
will simply be "New York", as there is no italic face of NY.

JK