[XeTeX] XeTeX and font specimens

[William Adams]

On Aug 2, 2006, at 4:27 PM, Jon Breitenbucher wrote:

> Did you finish the LaTeX port? I assume so but didn't see it on CTAN
> or in the list. I'd be interested in it.

I've got a first rough pass at it, which works for the following:

%%%%%% Store the following in a file named for the font
%%%%%% one wants a specimen of, e.g., ``Hoefler Text.tex''
%!TEX TS-program = xelatex
%!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode
\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage{typespec}
\begin{document}
\TypesetSample
\end{document}

when one has the ``typespec.sty'' file I've hacked together in one's  
search path. (Attached)
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I don't quite have it finished though, in particular I want to find a  
good algorithm for calculating characters per pica --- Stephen Moye  
uses ``Type Factor'' instead, which doesn't work w/ any of my copy- 
fitting tables and I don't have typesetting that or a something else  
in at the bottom.

I did ask for feature requests at the presentation though, and the  
most notable one was a request for support of alphabets other than  
Latin (I've decided to load all such macros from an external file ---  
hopefully I can patch in some sort of support for Babel or whatever  
is its successor for XeTeX).

And of course, I want to re-write it w/ documentation as a .dtx file....

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications