[XeTeX] on fontspec 1.10

[Will Robertson]

Hi,

I suppose I should have forseen this complaint.
Before I address it, I would like to ask if anyone minds that  
fontspec features are accessed with mixed case keyval syntax. It's  
come up previously that all other LaTeX packages would use  
[letters=smallcaps], so fontspec's a little in the wrong, but I've  
been a bit loathe to change it and make things even more confusing  
(in the short term).

Anyway...

Ralf Stubner wrote:
> I have run into a similar problem with a font I am currently  
> developing,
> which (like GFS Didot) has small caps only for the regular shape. I
> tried to avoid this by changing
>
> \newfontinstance\spacedsc[LetterSpace=5.0,%
>                           Letters=SmallCaps,%
>                           Letters=UppercaseSmallCaps]{FPL Neu}

No, this one is better than calling \addfontfeature every time, since  
the option processing occurs only once (the actual font definitions  
will only occur the first time, though). It's a negligible  
difference, but...

Now, back to the problem. Since [Letters=SmallCaps] is only defined  
for the upright shape, to avoid warnings for the other shapes you  
should activate this feature for the upright shape only:

\newfontinstance\spacedsc[
   LetterSpace=5.0,
   UprightFeatures={
     Letters={SmallCaps,UppercaseSmallCaps}}
                          ]{FPL Neu}

(untested...note that you shouldn't need to escape endofline chars in  
keyval syntax unless I've made a bit of a mistake -- which certainly  
has happened in the past!)

I do realise this syntax is a bit ugly...any suggestions for  
improvements?

The whole philosophy (whether right or wrong) is that features passed  
directly are attempted to be activated for all font shapes.

> However, that only shifted the warnings to other places. Fortunately,
> fontspec.sty provides the 'quiet' option which supresses such  
> warnings.
> One might miss useful warnings that way, though.

Right, this should probably only be used in the last resort.

> Hence I take this as a
> hint to design small caps for the other shapes ... ;-)

Ha ha, yeah! Do that :)
Out of curiosity, how are you developing your font?
I'd have loved to have learned MetaType1 and tried my own, but time  
is too short when you've got a PhD to try to do. Hopefully for the  
future.

All the best,

Will