[XeTeX] Strangeness with Minion Pro Opticals Small Caps

[Peter Heslin]

Peter Heslin <pj at heslin.eclipse.co.uk>
writes:

> The second one, at regular size, has a "Th" ligature instead of the
> small cap T and H, and the three instances of the letter "i" have a
> single dot on top of the small-cap I.  The other letters are OK.

I solved the problem by sleeping on it.  When I first was trying out
xetex, I didn't have any opentype fonts to play with, so I installed the
fonts that come with Acrobat Reader (including the set of 4 basic Minion
Pro non-opticals).  Then, because I liked xetex so much, I bought
Adobe's "Type Classics for Learning", which includes the Minion Pro
Opticals.  I installed those fonts and did not bother to uninstall the
fonts from Acrobat Reader, even though these were now all redundant.

The installation of two different versions of Minion Pro is what
confused xetex.  When I uninstalled the Reader-provided fonts, the test
file compiled correctly.  I guess the reason the regular size was
confused and the sub-head size was fine is that only the former was
installed in a conflicting version.

I probably will not be the last person to follow this sort of upgrade
path in this stupid fashion, so I wonder if it would be possible for
xetex to detect this sort of incompatible font situation and complain
loudly?

-- 
Peter Heslin (http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin)