[XeTeX] [OT] Free fonts for fontspec examples?

[Will Robertson]

On 2010-07-13 03:37:13 +0930, David Perry 
<hospes.primus at verizon.net> said:

>> This has always been available under the "Variant=0/1/2/3/..." feature
>> but this name wasn't very obvious. In more recent versions of fontspec
>> you can use "StylisticSet=0/1/2...".
> Thank you, thank you.  I hadn't picked up on this.  The naming
> conventions have always confused me, since there is a Fontspec feature
> "Alternate" and "alternate" is also an option within the "Style"
> feature, while stylistic sets were "Variants."

Style=Alternate and Alternate=0 are synonyms (for historical reasons).

The reason the naming scheme is so chaotic is that it was first written 
to support Mac OS X AAT fonts (this was before XeTeX supported 
OpenType!) and the OpenType support slowly merged with and then 
supplanted the original purpose of the package.

I'm trying to document OpenType font features now with clear reference 
to the actual feature tag, but I'm aware some of my terminology still 
needs to be updated. Please do tell me if you find an unclear paragraph 
(or twenty) in the manual and I'll do what I can to clear things up.


> If clearer terminology could be found for all this, it would be a real
> improvement.

For the hypothetical fontspec v3.0, I would like to totally revisit all 
of the feature names (while supporting backwards compatibility of 
course) but it's a big job for not much reward :)

It might also be useful for advanced users to be able to type

    \fontspec[ss01,hlig,cwsh]{...}

That's certainly much easier to achieve!


> In the last couple of days I have been thinking about using the
> Character Variant feature (cv01-cv99) rather the stylistic alternate
> feature for accessing glyphs such those I referred above.  I haven't
> gotten very far with this, but it might be something to add.  (Does
> anyone know of examples of this in use?)

I only just heard about these new features, too. I would also like to 
see some examples -- I assume that a feature name like

     CharacterVariant=0/1/2/3/4...

would be fine for fontspec?

Thanks,
Will