[XeTeX] Scaling a font

[Jonathan Kew]

On 29 Jan 2007, at 11:24 am, Will Robertson wrote:

> On 29/01/2007, at 19:44 , Tim Eyre ティム wrote:
>
>> \font\sc="MyriadPro-It:+onum,scale=800" at 10pt
>
> I think that TeX has this built in, something like
>
> \font\sc="MyriadPro-It:+onum" scaled 800 at 10pt

Sorry, Will, that won't work!

In TeX's \font command, you can either "at <size>" or "scaled  
<number>" to load a font at something other than its design size  
(which XeTeX always treats as 10pt for non-TFM fonts). But you can't  
use both "at" and "scaled" together. The first one will end the font  
specification, and the second will simply get printed as text.

For xelatex users, fontspec provides the [Scale=...] option, doesn't  
it? So it would be possible to use \newfontinstance to load a reduced- 
size font, I suppose. But what that's doing at a lower level is  
simply calculating a new "at size". There's no built-in facility to  
use a scale factor in addition to the absolute point size in a  
primitive font declaration.

I'm interested in adding a more general "matrix=...." option to the  
\font command sometime in the future, so that you can do non-linear  
scaling, skewing, etc., but this isn't available at present.

JK