[XeTeX] Ligatures in Expert font

[William F. Adams]

On Aug 9, 2005, at 10:40 AM, Philipp Gunz wrote:

> Is is possible to use ligatures in XeTex when they are in a an Expert 
> or Alternate font such as Linotype's Sabon Next?
> I assume I will have to code them manually. Can you give me advice on 
> how to do that?

AIUI, You would need to build a new font with AAT tables in it encoding 
the ligatures &c. Alternately, you could just work with the font in a 
TeX which supports / expects virtual fonts.

Apple's font tools would allow one to do this (though you might need to 
convert to TrueType), and they have (had?) an example of doing this.

You can get access to the font tools and their docs by joining the 
Apple Developer Connection at the free / on-line level.

All of the above is dependent on the font's license allowing such 
manipulation of course.

That said, it would be nice to have a way to dump a font to a list of 
tables / features, be able to modify that and read it back in with 
changed behaviours --- I doubt that it would be worth what I suspect is 
a rather large effort though. If I'm wrong and it's trivial, I'd love 
to have it, if for no other reason than it would allow one to archive a 
job with an expectation of being able to re-run it after an OS (and 
font) update w/o changes.

William

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William Adams, publishing specialist
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