[XeTeX] Palatino, clones and it's Greek to me (was Re: Package geometry with XeTeX)

[William Adams]

On Jul 18, 2006, at 2:02 AM, jeffdod at netzero.net wrote:

> Well, I finally discovered the cause of the bottom-margin-overrun
> problem. My document used the "Bookman Antiqua" font for English
> text, and various other fonts (GFS Didot, KadmosU, etc.) for Greek
> text. In the paragraph-style footnotes, each footnote consisted of a
> Greek word followed by an English definition (using Bookman Antiqua).
> It turns out that the Bookman font was the problem. If I switched to
> using another font for the English, such as "Times New Roman" or
> whatever, the problem went away.

?!?

Do you mean Monotype Book Antiqua or Bookman Oldstyle?

If the former, it's a nasty knock-off of Prof. Hermann Zapf's  
Palatino. Use Linotype Palatino bundled w/ Windows 2000 and later if  
you've an available license or are inclined to purchase it (or get  
Palatino Nova if you want to splurge) or try the nifty FPL Neu  
OpenType font which Ralf Stubner has been working on:

>> Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner at physik.uni-erlangen.de> writes:
>>
>>
>>> A prerelease version (version 0.9.4) can be found here:
>>> <URL:http://www.tfkp.physik.uni-erlangen.de/~ralf/tex/fplneu- 
>>> otf.zip>
>>>
>>
>> At the same place version 0.9.5 can now be found.
>>
>> Important changes
>>
>> * Regular font is now called "FPL Neu", not "FPL Neu Roman"
>>   => simplified usage in XeTeX version 0.994a
>>
>> * only OT feature tables, no AAT feature tables
>>   => features should work in TextEdit etc. on Mac OSX 10.4
>>
>> * some preliminary documentation


> I wonder if this has anything to do with some spacing problems I have
> seen with some other fonts? For example, in LaTeX and ConTeXt, the
> Aristarcoj Greek font works perfectly. In XeTeX, however, odd spaces
> between some letters appear (particularly between capital letters and
> lowercase), making the font unusable. I noticed this problem with
> MinionPro as well, although it is more subtle. For example, the only
> problem I saw in MinionPro was that an Eta character with some
> accents in front of it displays incorrectly on the screen in a PDF
> file. Specifically, any character that comes before the Eta character
> shows up on top of the Eta's accent characters.

There's been a lot of discussion of the spacing in Adobe's fonts with  
Greek letterforms recently. Adobe seems to be leaning towards a  
decision that their fonts need improvement in certain ways --- check  
the Adobe Typography forums (aliased to usenet:adobe.typography) for  
details.

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications



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