[XeTeX] Garogier [was: Aimwell font problem]

[Jonathan Kew]

On 12 Jan 2009, at 19:17, Gareth Hughes wrote:

> Now, I've got another typeface that presents similar problems. The  
> font
> is Garogier, available from
> http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~slam/fonts/fonts.html. Running
> OpenType-Info.tex reveals that latn/dflt has no features and grek/dflt
> has two mark tables. However, in FontForge, I can see that latn/dflt
> should have lnum, smcp, hist, liga, dlig and aalt. Obviously, XeTeX
> cannot access any of these features. Can anyone see what's going on  
> here?

I'm not yet sure why XeTeX isn't reporting the features properly, but  
inspecting the font by hand, I see that it is misusing some feature  
tags. For example, it has a 'mark' feature in the GSUB table in  
addition to the GPOS (which is why it gets reported twice for Greek).  
This is wrong; 'mark' is specified in the OpenType registry as a  
positioning feature. It looks like it's being used here to substitute  
alternate accent forms for Greek, but 'locl' (localized forms) would  
have been a more appropriate feature to use for that.

Another example is that it uses 'lnum' as both GSUB and GPOS, which  
does not conform to the feature description in the OpenType tag  
registry. In general, I don't think it is ever expected that a single  
feature tag will be implemented in both GSUB and GPOS tables, and I  
wouldn't be surprised if applications fail to handle this in a  
consistent manner.

However, that still doesn't explain why XeTeX can't seem to see any of  
the Latin features..... further investigation needed.

JK