[XeTeX] new 'size' feature of Opentype fonts

[Michael Zedler]

Jonathan Kew schrieb:
> On 19 Sep 2006, at 4:35 am, Michael Zedler wrote:
> 
>> Hello Jonathan,
>>
>> perhaps you followed the discussion on the opentype mailing list;
>> Adobe's new AFDKO 2.0 creates 'size' info according to the specs now.
> 
> Hi Michael -
> 
> I'm afraid I don't keep up with the OT list, normally....
> 
>> I generated an otf version of MnSymbol (all the 14 fonts) that uses  
>> the
>> new size feature and put it on
>> http://www.hft.ei.tum.de/mz/MnSymbolOTF.zip. Perhaps you may find it
>> useful for testing when you add support for the new size feature.
> 
> Good to see that work is happening on this. However, it's not yet  
> perfect.... see below. (XeTeX does support the 'size' feature, as  
> implemented in several Adobe fonts. However, its implementation in  
> MnSymbol doesn't seem to be quite right yet, and so it does not find  
> the optical faces properly.)

If you update to the most recent version of the lcdf typetools (or also 
fontforge) you'll see that the optical size information is correct -- 
according to the corrected size feature by Adobe. New font releases of 
Adobe will use this corrected size feature as well.
Details were posted to the opentype mailing list, as well as some pseudo 
code how applications can use both old/broken and new/correct size infos.
These are pretty recent changes, ADFKO 2 was just released yesterday :-)

> Note:
> same problems as the regular fonts; in addition, the subfamily ID is  
> the same for bold and regular, which is incorrect.

Thanks for the info, I've updated 
http://www.hft.ei.tum.de/mz/MnSymbolOTF.zip

> In addition, the font names seem odd, and somewhat inconsistent. I  
> haven't done an exhaustive dump and comparison, but many (not all)  
> seem to have a family name that is *only* a number, for example. A  
> careful review and cleanup is needed, I think, before these are ready  
> for use as an OpenType family.

I hope this is fixed now, too. Is it? Unfortunately I don't quite 
understand yet the font naming stuff as described in AFDKO's 
documentation. My FontMenuDB file of AFDKO now contains lines like

[MnSymbol10]
         f=MnSymbol
         s=Regular 10
         b=Bold 10
[MnSymbol-Bold10]
         f=MnSymbol
         s=Bold 10

Michael