[XeTeX] Finding out if a font supports a particular Unicode character and using it

[Chris Jones]

On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 07:22:28PM EST, Peter Baker wrote:

[..]

> But my guess would be you might solve the problem by updating
> FontForge.  Apr. 2008 is pretty early in the history of FF Python
> scripting, and I  wouldn't be surprised if FF was using memory
> inefficiently at that time.  And, as I've said, Python 2.5.2 is
> working fine for me.
>
> And it would be easier, I suspect, to update FF than Python, which has
> so many dependencies in any Linux system. So that's a place to try.

A sensible approach. 

I maintain a debian squeeze system on another partition so I can find
out what I'm in for when "testing" becomes "stable". Let me check the
version of fontforge on that system and run a test to see if it make a
difference.

Also, I checked my ~/.fontswith/ directory and found a fontswith.index
file in there and quickly browsing it confirmed that your script had
successfully indexed GNU/unifont at some point. 

I ran a quick test that quickly revealed the following:

| $ fontswith ~/.fontswith/fontswith.index U+5D0
| These fonts contain the glyph U+05D0:
| unifont: ./unifont.ttf

So it looks like the indexing did work at some point.

Thank you for your comments. 

I will keep the list posted on my findings.

CJ