[XeTeX] \XeTeXglyphbounds question

[Will Robertson]

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for your comments.

On 2011-02-07 22:34:05 +1030, Jonathan Kew 
<jfkthame at googlemail.com> said:

> So while I think I agree that it would be good for \XeTeXcharglyph to 
> respect the font's selected OT features, it's important to recognize 
> the limitations inherent in *any* API that tries to get glyph 
> information at the level of individual characters. I worry that people 
> will start assuming that they can identify which characters are 
> affected by a given feature on the basis of an API like this, which is 
> a fundamentally flawed approach.

Ah, I see. That makes a lot of sense.

I agree with you that it's a flawed approach in general, but it's an 
okay approach for a certain class of features. I guess I'm mostly just 
thinking of the problems I've had in the past with +sups existing in a 
font but either through design or font bug, some "obvious" glyphs were 
not being superscripted. Being able to check simple substitutions would 
allow better fall-back behaviour in such cases... but as always "get a 
better font" is always good advice :)

Off the top of my head I can't think of any other times that I've 
wanted to check such things. But I seem to remember I've thought about 
it on a couple of different occassions. (How about, say, faking a small 
caps $ if one doesn't exist in the font?)

Cheers,
Will