[XeTeX] fontspec and XeTeX svn rev. 375

[Morten Høgholm]

On Thu, 28 Sep 2006 14:46:14 +0200, William Adams <will.adams at frycomm.com>  
wrote:

> On Sep 28, 2006, at 8:32 AM, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>
>> This seems fragile, as (if I understand correctly) it is setting a
>> fixed length based on whatever happens to be the current font at this
>> point while your preamble is being processed -- not necessarily the
>> font you'll actually be using for the main text, or for the footnote.
>> So it might be affected in unexpected ways by the packages you're
>> loading, their relative order, etc.
>
> An interesting point, one which I think Peter Wilson noted in his
> memoir documentation.
>
> Is it acceptable to call ``\normalfont''after making a font
> declaration in the preamble?

I think so but then again I wrote Peter about that thing with \parindent  
which he then added to the manual... :-)

> I've often thought that the whole LaTeX preamble concept needed to be
> tidied up and formalized somewhat --- is there something on LaTeX3
> regarding this which I've missed?

Preambles, no, but there is one thing which is relevant here: templates,  
which are parameterized functions. Usually a parameter is set whenever the  
template is declared but one can also choose to add wrap the default  
parameter value in \DelayEvaluation so that it is only set when actually  
using the template. This footnote example is one case where that would be  
handy, \parindent and other such parameters another.
-- 
Morten