[XeTeX] xltxtra wishlist

[caapv 208]

--- Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org> wrote:

> Well, you could use Graphite, but then you'd have to
> re-implement  
> whatever OpenType behavior was in the original font;
> what people are  
> hoping for some day is a way to *augment* an
> existing font with some  
> additional kern pairs or other customizations.

It shouldn't be too difficult to dump OpenType layout
tables to Graphite source.  I do aware that character/
glyph rearrangements are not encoded in OpenType and
you have to supplement your Graphite source with such
information for Indic and other complicated scripts.

> We
> don't want to start  
> over from scratch,

Once you (or someone else) have made a fully featured
layout definition for a given font, others can build
his/her own customization on top of it.  Notice many
"font packages" for classical TeX contain TFM/VF files
which redefine metrics and ligatures of existing fonts.
See for example
http://home.vrweb.de/~was/fonts.html
for manually optimized TFM's rather than afm2pl
generated ones.

> redefining all the behavior of
> Zapfino (for  
> example) just to add a kern pair.

Auto-converting mort/morx tables to other formats can
be difficult or impossible, I have to agree.

> JK

Regards,
SMiyata

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