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

[Will Robertson]

Jonathan Kew wrote:
> On 11 Oct 2004, at 12:13 am, Will Robertson wrote:
> 
>> 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.)

After reading the below: ohhh! You're right, of course.

> 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.

This is great. I can almost imagine a future in which font support is as 
automatic in XeTeX as in XeLaTeX - the only problem is funny font 
weights. Do you have any idea, Jonathon, if Mac OS X knows any more 
about all the weights of say, Helvetica Neue, than the names?

As a feature request for the distant future, is it possible to return 
all of the available style names of a font? (Since I assume with them 
you could guess all of the shape info...)

How exciting!
Will