[XeTeX] Character alternatives
William F. Adams
wadams at atlis.com
Tue Sep 14 15:28:32 CEST 2004
This is a thing which I've been trying to tackle w/ my Zapfino font
setup (using Omega).
Unfortunately, I've gotten bollixed by otp2ocp crashing after my .otp
pashes a certain size --- the thing which may be of interest here is
that I hacked up a 16-bit encoding scheme for describing arbitrary
ligatures or alternates (sans accents, sorry) with up to 32 variations
per character. The preprint is online on the TUG2003 area at
www.tug.org --- you maybe can get something of a sense for how I'm
trying to make it work by looking at the OTP, it's at:
> http://members.aol.com/willadams/fonts/tex/zapfino/lat2zapf.otp
Essentially one divides the 16 bits into a six bit and two five bit
chunks. The first six-bit is sufficient to encode all letters (cap and
lowercase) and numbers 0--9, and have a bit or two left over for
``swashness'' &c. and the remaining pairs of five bits would get one
either a variant setting and succeeding lowercase, or two succeeding
lowercase. I did up a set of Excel spreadsheets to show what these were
while I was working on it.
The idea was that one would set up the TeX end of things to always
access things using the above numbers, and set up a virtual font to
access the characters in the real font---that way if a font were
upgraded and new characters added, one would ``merely'' need to update
the virtual font w/ the new mappings, but the .tex source could be left
alone.
William
--
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com
More information about the XeTeX
mailing list