[XeTeX] Character Variants

[mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Sun, 27 Mar 2011, Paul Isambert wrote:
> Both, actually. The font by itself does nothing, it simply indicates what the
> rendering engine should do. I suppose (because it's seems the simplest way
> here) that this is implemented as a ligature.

By that logic it could be said that no software ever does anything, it
only indicates what the computer hardware should do. What I meant was,
does the handling of variation selectors consist entirely of a feature
table with "sub xxx yyy by zzz" entries, so that it could be turned on in
XeTeX the same way we turn on ligatures?  That's a simple yes/no question.
As you say it would make sense for the answer to be "yes", but I haven't
been able to find an authoritative answer on the Net.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/