[XeTeX] fontspec, xetex and Adobe Garamond & oddities

[Will Robertson]

On 27 Oct 2004, at 10:50 PM, William F. Adams wrote:

> I'm shifting my ``One Typeface: Many Fonts'' booklet from my personal 
> portfolio (http://members.aol.com/willadams, also in the TeX Showcase 
> at http://www.tug.org/texshowcase) and encountered a couple of strange 
> thigns which I wanted to comment on:

Good!

>  - documentation --- Will, you might want to mention that 
> ``\setromanfont'' et. al. works in the preamble, but ``\fontspec'' 
> doesn't and that the latter has to come after ``\begin{document}''

Ah yes. Good idea.

>  Also, providing a minimal document to add to the templates might be 
> kind of nice

Do you mean the TeXShop templates?
In any case, I'll put together something small to pop out of the dtx.

>  - small ampersand, Unicode FE60 --- this character doesn't seem to 
> work.
>
> You get a question mark instead of the desired small ``a''
>
> Using \& in a [LetterCase=SmallCaps] environment doesn't work either 
> (you get the full-height ampersand, not the small one). Bug in quartz 
> pdf or Adobe Garamond or mis-feature in xetex?
>
> (This is all on 10.3.5)

I've found there have been a fair few bugs in the various fonts I've 
tried out. It's pretty clear that not many people actually use the 
various advanced features and so the quality control is pretty poor.

BTW, Jonathan, is a bug with the OpenType library XeTeX? The "ordinals" 
OpenType feature only raises the very first character after a number, 
which makes it useless:
    %&program=xetex
    \font\agp="Adobe Garamond Pro:+ordn" at 20pt\agp
    1st 2nd 3rd 0th 6abcd
    \end

But back to this small ampersand problem...this works for me (as does 
using the c2sc feature):
    %&program=xetex
    \font\agp="Adobe Garamond Pro" at 20pt\agp
    \&
    \font\agp="Adobe Garamond Pro:+smcp" at 20pt\agp
    \&
    \end
But it doesn't work with fontspec. I'll investigate.
And yes, I'm having issues using the small ampersand, but in every app 
I try...

Cheers,
Other Will