[XeTeX] : Re: Ligatures and things

[John Was]

Dear Jonathan

Many thanks for that quick response - I've been conscious all along that there must be documentation and resource files floating around that I've had trouble locating.  I yearn for the days of big fat bound instruction manuals!  But the advice you've given should be plenty to be going on with.  I'll try to get to the bottom of – and — in my input files not yielding true ens and ems.  In this experimental phase I'm just using Word's plain text format for input but I realize I'll soon have to move over to a proper Unicode text editor, and perhaps at least some of these glitches will disappear at that point.

Best


John

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jonathan Kew 
  To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms 
  Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 11:06 AM
  Subject: JunkEmail: Re: [XeTeX] Ligatures and things




  On 29 May 2007, at 10:21 am, John Was wrote:


    Hello all

    I'm still experiencing some trouble with XeTeX (run in plain TeX rather than LaTeX) and fonts on my Windows system.  When accessing fonts that show up normally in Windows applications such as Word I find some of them work while others crash XeTeX, without any obvious common factor.  Not much of a worry since the ones that do the crashing are not generally fonts that I want to use anyway.  In trying out the outline font Minion Pro (the version that comes with Adobe Acrobat Reader, located in its Resource directory), which I _would_ probably want to use, I find - as per an early message of mine - that XeTeX crashes if I use the font name but not if I go directly to the .otf font file using square brackets round the file name.  Again this doesn't much bother me (except that I'd like to know why it happens!), 



  I'd also like to know why this happens - it shouldn't!


    but I've now found that although the five standard ligatures are achieved automatically (ff, fi etc.), the en and em dashes are not picked up either by the usual -- and --- or by explicitly using an ASCII en or em dash in the input file (-- and --- just give double and triple hyphens in the PDF, the true en and em dashes both give single hyphens).




  This is correct; the use of hyphen-ligatures to produce en- and em-dashes is a peculiarity of traditional TeX fonts, and you can't expect to find this behavior in mainstream OpenType fonts. The expectation everywhere except TeX is that if you want an em-dash, you use an em-dash character in the text (not three hyphens).



    Is there any way to make XeTeX see the dashes automatically?  I've just discovered that they don't work in Times New Roman either, which is usually a pretty reliable font to test things on.  I have a nasty feeling that I'm going to have trouble with quotation marks too!




  So you are.


  However, there is a solution through XeTeX's "font-mapping" mechanism. If you load fonts with the "tex-text" mapping file (included in the TL installation), this will apply the "standard" TeX-style mappings to the characters, replacing "---" with "—", etc.


  In plain TeX terms:
    \font\tenrm = "Times New Roman:mapping=tex-text" at 10pt


  or in LaTeX terms:
    \usepackage{fontspec}
    \setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Times New Roman}


  etc.



    Relatedly, is there some extended version of testfont.tex that would generate a PDF of all the characters in a given font?  (The helpful PDF guide to XeTeX by Jonathan Kew in the TeXLive distribution mentions a number of sample .TEX files that might  be of help here, but I can't find any of them, either in TeXLive or indeed anywhere at all on the Internet: they have perhaps been withdrawn in the current version.)


  There should be a (somewhat oldish) archive of sample files available on the XeTeX web site (http://scripts.sil.org/xetex); look on the Downloads page. Many of these will use Mac OS X fonts, so you'll need to change font names in order to run them on other platforms, but they may still be instructive.


  JK





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