[XeTeX] Aimwell font problem

[Jonathan Kew]

I downloaded one of these fonts, and ran OpenType-info.tex to see what  
features it showed. It does indeed have some OpenType features, but I  
notice that they are placed under the script tag 'dflt', rather than  
the expected 'latn'. This is why xetex is not applying them; it uses  
the Latin-script features by default, unless told otherwise with the  
'script=....' option on the font name.

When I load the font using

   \font\tst = "Garava:script=dflt" at 12pt
   \tst In this sample, ligatures like fi and fl work correctly.
   \bye

then the ligatures appear as expected.

However, I'm not sure if there's a way to do this via fontspec at  
present. Anyway, it's really an error in the fonts, I believe; they  
should be using the proper script tag for the OpenType script(s) they  
want to support.

(I see that some discussions at the high-logic.com web site, which  
relate to the tools used for these fonts, show an example with the  
script tag 'dflt'. However, they use it *in addition to* 'latn', in  
which case things would have worked; but in any case I believe it is  
wrong. The tag for a "default script" should be 'DFLT' (uppercase),  
judging by the list on Adobe's developer site and at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/scripttags.htm 
. The lowercase tag 'dflt' is correct for the default *language*  
within a script, but not as an actual script tag. This seems to be  
incorrectly documented in several places, including the Symbian web  
site and even some text found on Adobe's own site, unfortunately!)

 From the web page, I also note that they seem to be using Private Use  
Area codes to make glyphs available to applications that don't support  
OpenType features. That works, but leads to non-portable, font- 
dependent text, so it's not a good long-term way to work.... beware of  
data encoding/integrity/compatibility issues.

JK


On 11 Jan 2009, at 17:42, Gareth Hughes wrote:

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> I've been trying to get the freely downloadable typefaces from Aimwell
> (http://www.aimwell.org/Fonts/fonts.html) to work with XeTeX. There  
> are
> some nice typefaces with OpenType features. However, I cannot get  
> any of
> the features to work. Opening the faces with FontForge shows all the
> right GSUB lookup tables. The warnings in FontForge suggest that the
> glyphs may be mapped wrongly. Can anyone suggest how these fonts could
> be got working?
>
> Gareth.
>
> - --
> Gareth Hughes
>
> Department of Eastern Christianity
> Oriental Institute
> Pusey Lane
> Oxford
> OX1 2LE
>
> +44 (0)1865 610227
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