[XeTeX] chess fonts with xelatex

[Jonathan Kew]

On 12 Jan 2008, at 2:58 pm, Ulrike Fischer wrote:

> I was now wondering if I could add some support for ttf chess fonts
> installed in the normal (windows) fonts folder. To be able to do it
> I must somehow reencode the fonts.
>
> Unicode can not be used as chess fonts are highly unstandard. Most
> chars don't have a unicode number. Also the different authors of the
> fonts did put the chars quite randomly in the character table and
> also used various glyphs name.

There are chess pieces encoded at U+2654 onwards, but yes, I expect  
various chess fonts have additional idiosyncratic glyphs that may not  
have Unicode values. And old chess fonts probably don't use the  
Unicode encoding even for the basic symbols.

> So in the psfonts.map almost every font has its own encoding vector:
>
> chess-pirat-lsf ChessFigurinePirat " ChessPiratFigEncoding
> ReEncodeFont " <chess-pirat-fig.enc <chess-pirat-fig-raw.pfb
>
> How could such reencoding be done with XeTeX if the fonts are in the
> system font folder?

I suppose it should be possible to use the font-mapping mechanism  
(like the tex-text mapping that's commonly used with Latin-script  
fonts). You could write mappings for each font to map some standard  
character encoding (preferably Unicode!) to the font-specific codes  
needed.

JK