[XeTeX] Character alternatives

[Jonathan Kew]

On 14 Sep 2004, at 1:06 pm, Musa Furber wrote:

>
> On 14 Sep 2004, at 14:04, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>
>>
>> On 14 Sep 2004, at 4:52 am, Musa Furber wrote:
>>
>>> Is there an easy mechanism for accessing the various alternatives 
>>> for a given character, such as what you can do for some fonts at the 
>>> bottom of the Typography dialog?
>>>
>>
>> No, sorry; it's not clear to me how one could approach that. I assume 
>> the popups in the Typography palette are derived from a 'Zapf' table 
>> in the fonts, but it's hard to envision a workable TeX-source-level 
>> way to specify such choices, in the absence of some kind of 
>> meaningful naming of the variants.
>
> Does the naming problem have to do with what XeTeX would use to select 
> the correct glyph, or what the user would need to tell XeTeX to get 
> the right glyph?

XeTeX can get to all the glyphs (see the \XeTeXglyph command), but 
arbitrary numbers aren't a very friendly (or robust) way to specify 
things. But what else would you expect to be able to say at the TeX 
source level in order to identify the glyph you want?

>
> Have you seen Sivan Toledo's article "Exploiting Rich Fonts" in 
> TUGboat volume 21 (2000), No. 2? There he somehow uses ^ to jump to 
> the alternative characters.

No, I haven't, sorry.

JK