[XeTeX] How to use EC font encoding in XeTeX?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 21 May 2006, at 9:21 pm, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> Thank you for the very precise explanation. This time I should say
> "shame on me", because I discovered that these commands are already
> described in the documentation as well. (Some time ago I glimpsed
> through the documentation and figured out that there were so few
> things written there that there was hardly any answer found in it. So
> I thought that reading the source or asking on the list was still the
> only way to find out how exactly XeTeX works. And I forgot about that
> document in the meantime. Sorry again.)

No need to feel ashamed! I realize that the "documentation" is close  
to non-existent (and of course whatever is written there might be out  
of date anyway), so the only real authority is the source code, and  
the next best thing is the mailing list. But yes, it *is* worth  
reading the XeTeX-notes file, brief though it is!

>>> I might have something misconfigured or too old version installed (I
>>> didn't install .992 yet), so I'm just curious: what do you get if  
>>> you
>>> type
>>>     \catcode`ð=\active \defð{^^f0}
>>>     ð
>>> My version seems to have some problems with ^^f0.
>>
>> It seems to work for me -- with font ec-lmr10, it prints the ð
>> character, as expected. What do you get?
>
> It just "hangs" (stops) at that point and niether gives any error
> messages nor does it process further. \eth works OK though (which
> means that ConTeXt already did that conversion once) and any other
> "hex number" works OK as well, it's just "f0" that causes problems.
> Strange. I have to investigate it a bit further.

Very strange.

The fact that \eth works may be unrelated, as this might eventually  
expand to something like \char"F0, rather than using the ^^ form  
anywhere.

How about trying it in a simple Plain-based test file, to see if it  
still gives trouble?

If you can find more clues about what's happening, I'd be interested  
to know; at the moment, I can't think of a XeTeX-related reason why  
this should happen, but of course there could well be a bug lurking  
somewhere and causing confusion.

JK