[XeTeX] New Bitstream OTF Charter problem

[Jonathan Kew]

On 10 Jul 2005, at 12:02 pm, Stephen Moye wrote:

> I have just received the new (to me anyway) Charter OTF fonts.  
> There are some ornaments (and a number of other characters as well)  
> that do not have unicode tags. I'm wondering how to get at them.  
> \char doesn't seem to work. Is there an way for XeTeX to access the  
> names of the characters? Is there some basic access method I'm  
> overlooking?
>
> This is driving me crazy -- of course, it's a short drive... ;>}

So they don't have any associated character codes? I would have  
expected ornaments to be assigned codes in the Private Use area, in  
the absence of standard Unicode values. (Or possibly to be accessed  
as alternate glyphs for some other Unicode value, via an optional  
font feature.)

No, XeTeX can't access them by name. But if they truly are unencoded  
and inaccessible via any Unicode value and font feature combination,  
you should still be able to render them using \XeTeXglyph as a last  
resort. But be aware that this is font-specific and fragile; if the  
fonts are updated at some point, glyph IDs are quite likely to change.

I suppose something like \XeTeXnamedglyph{...} might be a useful  
extension some day - but really, every glyph you want to render  
should have an associated Unicode value, with non-standard ornaments,  
etc., being encoded in the PUA.

JK