[XeTeX] Custom kerning

[Peter Baker]

John Was wrote:
> Hello Florian
>
> Your list of desiderata pretty well coincides with mine, and the 
> problem of roman parentheses round an italic word  comes up frequently 
> (particularly acute with e.g. (_f_) I find).  In British (as opposed 
> to continental) typography, one could simply use a font editor to 
> replace all occurrences of italic ( ) [ ] < > { } in a font with their 
> roman counterparts, since the italic versions were virtually unused in 
> normal academic book work (while I was at it, I used to make sure the 
> kerning was satisfactory, of course - and for good measure I would 
> always replace the broad acute-angled < > with their tall 
> obtuse-angled equivalents (of more use to me in textual work), moving 
> the acute-angled ones to other slots in case I needed them).
>
Thanks to Florian and John for planting a good idea. I am in the process 
of adding upright parens, brackets and braces to the italic versions of 
Junicode. These shapes will be selectable with ss16, and kerning (the 
whole point of the exercise, and the biggest job) will be correct. I'll 
mention it here when it's ready.

Peter