[XeTeX] support for variation & multiple master fonts

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 21.12.2005 um 00:06 schrieb Jonathan Kew:

> How many of you care about support for AAT variation fonts (like 
> Skia), and/or Multiple Master fonts (MinionMM, MyriadMM, etc.), and at 
> the same time are *not* running Tiger (10.4.x)?
>

I have no MM fonts. And from next year on I'll surely be on Tiger, so I 
don't care that much about both losses. I know that George Williams' 
FontForge supports in some way AAT. In case FF is able to integrate 
glyph variants into a font I would keep AAT support, being a valuable 
feature. And I think that clever users would like to keep rich fonts 
even if Apple might drop them ...

Could it work to release a final version of XeTeX with MultiMaster and 
AAT support for pre-Tiger systems? The developing release would only 
work on post-Panther systems then. Or do you expect that too many bugs 
could be found in the abandoned branch? (There is something similiar 
happening in another place: in GNU Emacs most development happens in a 
heavily outdated, patchy, and unnecessarily complicated non-Unicode 
branch which will even lead to a new release of GNU Emacs 22, while the 
more useful Unicode Emacs just takes over most patches and developments 
and might be released on the next Olympic summer games [2008].)


One late wish for XeTeX 1.0: could you 'unify' the command line 
interfaces of xetex and xdv2pdf to accept the same arguments and 
options, be more consistent? 'xetex --help' gives a long help, 'xdv2pdf 
--help' complains: 'xdv2pdf: invalid option -- -.' Then a short 'usage' 
message follows, while xetex writes about an 'Usage.'

--
Greetings

   Pete

The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is the day they 
start selling vacuum cleaners.