[XeTeX] PDFs and advanced font features

Bogdan Butnaru bogdanb+xetex at gmail.com
Fri Oct 29 17:29:10 CEST 2010


On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 16:59, William Adams <will.adams at frycomm.com> wrote:
> On Oct 28, 2010, at 11:05 AM, Bogdan Butnaru wrote:
>> On page 4 there are two examples of small caps usage. On my computer,
>> at least, the first one (Warnock Pro in italic+small caps) cannot be
>> copied correctly. The second example (in Hoefler Text, bold+small
>> caps) however does work. I suspect Hoefler Text uses a different font
>> file for the small caps rather than feature tags in a font with normal
>> minuscules.
>
> No, Hoefler Text is a QuickDraw/GX-derived Apple font and is a single file --- Warnock Pro is also a single file (Adobe OpenType font).

I don’t really know, I don’t have the font. This:
http://www.typography.com/fonts/font_styles.php?productLineID=100010
suggests they have a font for every “style”, and they seem to count
small caps as one. No idea exactly how they package it.

The point is that the encoding of glyphs in the resulting PDF is
different. If I copy page four and paste it in a simple text editor
(Geany, in my case) with a font that doesn’t have small caps (the
default “sans” font for my system, never knew how to find its name),
the Warnock example appears as gibberish (PUA codepoints, I assume),
while the Hoefler one is normal text. If I change Geany’s font to
Adobe Garamond Pro, then the Warnock example is visible, in Garamond’s
small caps. Basically, they seem to have the same PUA encoding for the
small caps.

(It appears from pdffont’s output that only one font is embedded in
the XeTeX manual for each of the two families, but since there are no
examples *without* small caps that doesn’t say much.)

-- Bogdan Butnaru



More information about the XeTeX mailing list