[XeTeX] linguistics trees using qtree: no go

[Jonathan Kew]

On 31 Jan 2007, at 9:54 pm, Will Robertson wrote:

> On 01/02/2007, at 2:12 , Bruno Voisin wrote:
>
>> However, the /B font "modifier" of XeTeX doesn't work fully for this
>> font: the font comes in 4 weights Light, Regular, Semibold and Bold;
>> Light/B switches to Semibold, as I suppose is intended, but Regular/B
>> switches also to Semibold, not Bold. Arguably, the Bold weight is a
>> bit heavy to my untrained eyes. But isn't Regular/B supposed to yield
>> Bold?
>
> This is all a little black magic, as I understand it. Does Semibold/B
> go to Bold? I think Jonathan's intention was to have /B move up the
> boldness scale one step at a time, but who knows if the font vendors
> embed the right information, correctly, inside their fonts.

Yes, it's all rather mysterious. The intent of /B is to pick  
something "suitably bolder" than the starting point. In a family with  
many weights, this may well be more than one step up the scale, but  
not necessarily all the way to the boldest available weight. But  
exactly what you'll get can be difficult to predict, depending on  
somewhat arbitrary values the font vendor has assigned.

When you want accurate control in complex families, I'd recommend  
explicitly naming the faces you want to use (with fontspec's  
[BoldFont=...] option, for example) rather than relying on the  
automatic choice of a bold version. The /B modifier is meant as a  
convenience for simple cases, but may not be adequate in a richer  
environment.

JK