[XeTeX] Opticals and math fonts

[Jonathan Kew]

On 30 Oct 2007, at 6:20 pm, Barry Schwartz wrote:

> Enrico Rossi <enrico.a.rossi at gmail.com> skribis:
>> 1. Are XeTeX and fontspec sufficiently clever to automatically pick
>> out the correct optical font from a family? It doesn't seem that way,
>> but it's hard to tell.
>
> In my experience fontconfig itself is too stupid to pick out the
> correct font from opticals--for instance, ask for Brioso Pro Regular
> and you get instead Brioso Pro Caption--so that could be a limitation
> on XeTeX's abilities, at least on Unix-like platforms. I think it is
> due to a design error (not a coding error as such) in fontconfig.

In theory, at least, XeTeX should be able to do this; it doesn't rely  
on fontconfig to "pick out the correct font", it just needs  
fontconfig to tell it all the fonts that are available, and then  
makes the choice itself.

So:

   \font\x="Brioso Pro" at 7pt
   \x This should be Brioso Pro Caption (\fontname\x)\medskip
   \font\y="Brioso Pro" at 10pt
   \y This should be plain Brioso Pro (\fontname\y)\medskip
   \font\z="Brioso Pro" at 16pt
   \z This should be Brioso Pro Subhead (\fontname\z)\medskip

works for me (note how \fontname can tell you what you actually got).  
YMMV.

JK