[XeTeX] Proposed change in color handling

[Will Robertson]

On 03/01/2006, at 23:50 , Stephen Moye wrote:

> On Monday, January 02, 2006, at 08:34AM, Jonathan Kew  
> <jonathan_kew at sil.org> wrote:
>
>> The change I am considering is to make the font colors override
>> colors set via \special, so that if a font has a color attribute, it
>> will *always* use that color. Where no font color is given (the usual
>> case), the text will follow the \special color values.
>>
>> It seems to me that this is a more natural and intuitive model for
>> the interaction between these two color-setting mechanisms, and it
>> removes the need for a \special operation that resets the default
>> color state.

I agree here; I assume some of this thinking was prompted by the  
previous thread on the color package blowing away fontspec's default  
roman font colour within floats. But the implications are more wide- 
reaching than this specific case, obviously.

And font-specific colour is better than using specials so it indeed  
should take priority, as seen by the problems faced (at least in  
LaTeX) with, e.g., coloured footnotes spanning pages in pdfTeX.

> Agreed, absolutely. The only thing I would like to see in specifying
> font color attributes is making it consistent with how colors are  
> specified
> in dvips. Instead of
>
>     \font\icky="Hoefler Text Black:color=FFFF00"
>
> perhaps something like
>
>     \font\icky="Hoefler Text Black:color=rgb 1.0 1.0 0.0"

I presume the hex form is used because that's what was easiest when  
passing the colour to Mac OS X to produce the PDF...but that's just  
an assumption. I never worked out exactly why XeTeX's specials  
provide such a richer colour specification.

Will