[XeTeX] XeTeX 0.99 released

[Will Robertson]

On 07/12/2005, at 2:57 , Jonathan Kew wrote:

> It's been a while coming, but XeTeX version 0.99 is now available  
> from <http://scripts.sil.org/xetex> and through i-Installer.

Wonderful, thanks Jonathan.
Right when I was going to get some work done :)

> * added Syriac OpenType support for Meltho (and similar) fonts to  
> the layout engine, activated with "script=syrc"

With the next release of fontspec I'm going to be restricting the  
script selection to scripts that actually contain shaping code. Is  
there a list anywhere of the scripts that XeTeX supports?

> * \fontdimen1 (slant) and \fontdimen5 (x-height) are set  
> appropriately when a native font is loaded; as a bonus, a newly- 
> assigned value \fontdimen8 is set to the cap height

Nice, thanks. I'll be adding auto-scaling features to fontspec in the  
near future...

> * font mappings are now applied to the text before checking for  
> possible hyphenation points, which can change behavior in certain  
> cases; in particular, en- and em-dashes typed as "--" and "---"  
> will no longer be considered possible line-break positions

This is a surprise, but a welcome one! From the previous discussions  
it sounded like this was a bit of a limitation with the technique in  
general, and although I'd never run into the problem, I wasn't too  
keen on the idea of my dashes breaking in half...

> Enjoy!

Thanks!

Out of curiosity, does this polish off the features you're expecting  
to have implemented for v1.0?

I'm trying to think why I wanted \ifXeTeXfontexists. And off the top  
of my head I really have no clue. Do you think it's a good idea?

Will