[XeTeX] Symbol fonts?

[Patrick Carr]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 5:33 PM, Nicolas Vaughan <nivaca at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm on windows Vista (and Ubuntu Linux, if needed). When I open the font
> with FontLab (I'm just now downloading FontLab), it tells me the font is
> encoded as "MS Windows Symbol". Its glyphs all have unicode names as, e.g.,
> F088, F089, etc. But when I try to access them in XeTeX with \char"F088,
> nothing happens.

I always get confused about the syntax for \XeTeXglyph and \char"
(i.e., hex or decimal? gylphID of unicode slot?), so I took a few
minutes to try to clarify this for Nicolas. I don't have the font he's
talking about, but in an old document I have, I had used an ornament
from Minion Pro Bold.

It's a thing that looks like two tildes that's a bit wide; it's a good
separator. Anyway, Linotype Font Explorer X tells me it's:

    Character code: 57545
    Unicode: U+E0C9 [which is just dec->hex(57545)]
    GlyphID: 515.

If I try either \char" or \XeTeXglyph with any of those numbers, I
don't get the right symbol. And \the\XeTeXcharglyph"E0C9 outputs a 0.
In my older document, I use \XeTeXglyph1118, which still works. Well,
where did I get 1118?

If I look at Apple's built-in character palette (show glyphs), it
tells me that the character I want is:

    Unicode: E062
    UTF8: EE 81 A2
    GID: 1118.

Now, \char"E062 produces the right glyph. It looks like Font Explorer
has a bug either reading or outputting higher-value unicode blocks.
(I've used its number successfully for other glyphs in other fonts.)
Or the Apple font system might be doing some weird translation.

Nicolas, maybe try using the Apple character palette instead of some
other program to get the glyph ID?

Pat Carr