[XeTeX] Using Gentium with XeteX

[Jonathan Kew]

On 28 Oct 2007, at 1:01 pm, Till Rettig wrote:

> But just out of curiosity why does the BoldFont feature not work, I
> mean: it works to assign the "bold" face a colour, but not the scaling
> of the weight. Is this a feature that works only with AAT fonts?

You're referring to the "Weight=..." feature you tried to apply,  
right? That can only work with fonts that define a weight variation  
axis, using either Multiple Master or AAT Variation technologies;  
XeTeX will not attempt to somehow "scale" the weight of a font unless  
the font itself defines how this should be done.

Given how few AAT Variation fonts were ever created, and that Adobe  
has given up on Multiple Masters as an end-user technology, this is  
probably of very limited use. The normal situation is that there will  
be distinct faces for the different weights; fontspec tries to find a  
sensible Bold one automatically, but you can explicitly specify which  
to use if that fails. But if there simply is no bold face (as with  
Gentium, so far), there's no way for fontspec to fake one.

Hope that's clear,

JK