[XeTeX] asterism

[Michiel Kamermans]

teginch at bluewin.ch wrote:
> Pete, Stephen,
>
> Thanks for your input. I had something along the lines of Peter Flynn's solution in my mind which would allow to use the same font. Worked great for me.

Note that this is of course very much not an asterism, but a creative 
way to construct something that looks like an asterism. As a 
consequence, people will not be able to do a search for an asterism in 
your document, even though reasonably speaking PDF files should be 
searchable. An alternative to the creative "making your own asterism 
rather than using the real unicode codepoint glyph" is to use XeLaTeX's 
character classes and define a new class for the asterism, and then 
setting up some simple rules to swap fonts only for characters from this 
class:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xltxtra} % automatically loads xunicode and fontspec
\newfontfamily{\extrafont}{FontThatContainsAsterism} % fontspec command 
that binds a fontswap to \extrafont
\newfontfamily{\rmfont}{MyFavouriteFont} % same for \rmfont
\setmainfont{MyFavouriteFont} % set up document's default font

\XeTeXinterchartokenstate = 1 % arguably the most distinguished xetex 
feature
\newXeTeXintercharclass\fontextras % request a new character class
\XeTeXcharclass `\⁂ \fontextras % assign your character this new class
\XeTeXinterchartoks 0 \fontextras = {\extrafont} % what to do when going 
from latin to any character in your class
\XeTeXinterchartoks 255 \fontextras = {\extrafont} % what to do when 
going from boundary to any character in your class
\XeTeXinterchartoks \fontextras 0 = {\rmfont} % what to do when going 
from any character in your class to latin
\XeTeXinterchartoks \fontextras 255 = {\rmfont}% what to do when going 
from any character in your class to boundary

\begin{document}
This text will render using the font bound to rmfont, but the ⁂ symbol 
will use the font bound to extrafont. This is done without us having to 
issue any kind of command in the text itself, so that we don't have to 
bother with \textbackslash asterism\textbackslash\ calls every time we 
want an asterism.
\end{document}


- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com