[XeTeX] Fwd: fontspec question on windows

[Will Robertson]

Hello,

I've got a request below that I'm rather ignorant about. (I stopped  
using Windows a while back, so I can't really test XeTeX-related stuff  
on Windows very easily.) Apparently XeTeX can't load fonts under  
Windows when they've got names than involve certain UTF-8 characters?!

Can anyone either confirm this problem or let me know that something  
else funny is going on here?

Many thanks,
Will

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Michiel Kamermans [EMAIL REDACTED]
> To: Will Robertson <wspr81 at gmail.com>
>
> Hi Will,
>
> I was wondering whether you knew how to work around this problem:  
> xetex files are utf8 files, but font names in windows are not  
> encoded in utf8, so fontspec cannot load every system font  
> available. As long as the font name contains only ascii characters  
> this is not a problem, but for 'foreign' named fonts it means xetex  
> throws up an error because it cannot find the font specfied, as  
> windows is still using the utterly moronic codepage system behind  
> the scenes. Even in vista/windows 2008 this is still the case, and  
> the last thing I'm counting on is microsoft rewriting their core to  
> be fully utf8 unicode compliant... =/
>
> How (im)possible would it be to detect which OS fontspec is being  
> used on, and using an iconv-like conversion for font names from  
> UTF-8 to whichever codepage windows is set to use, so that all  
> system fonts can be used in xetex on windows systems? (this problem  
> does not exist on utf8 supporting *nixen like ubuntu etc. but  
> running a virtual machine just for xetex is a bit silly if a  
> solution to the fontspec package is an option =)
>
> Best regards,
>
> -- 
> Michiel Kamermans, M.Sc
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