[XeTeX] Looking for a better font selection method

[musa furber]

On May 19, 2006, at 10:54 AM, Will Robertson wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Sounds like Doulos SIL needs to expand its character repertoire by a
> hundred thousand characters or so :)
>
> On 19/05/2006, at 17:00 , Pektiong Tân wrote:
>> Can we assign DIFFERENT DEFAULT FONT TO DIFFERENT UNICODE BLOCK?
>
> Not at present. Theoretically, a whole lotta active characters could
> do it, but that's impractical and very ugly.
>
> The only real solution at the moment is to logically tag all of your
> text, as you've done. There's a possibility in the future that
> virtual fonts could handle what you want (rather than a fallback-
> font, it would be more a combination-of-fonts), but I don't
> understand the full ramifications of such a scheme.

I asked about the same thing perhaps a year ago. Jonathan pointed out  
choosing the correct punctuation and numerals are problems.

Another alternative is a pre-processor to handling inserting text  
whenever transitioning between pre-defined ranges of characters. I  
wrote a small Python script to do this for Arabic and English (i.e.,  
to handle font and directionality changes). I decided that for my  
purposes it was better to just mark everything explicitly in LaTeX.

> Sorry!

Me, too.

Regards,
Musa