[XeTeX] [tex-live] TeTeX in TeX Live 2015 broken on Mac

[Khaled Hosny]

On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 11:55:41AM +0100, Philip Taylor wrote:
> 
> 
> Will Robertson wrote:
> > 
> >> On 24 Apr 2015, at 1:51 am, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> Even shorter:
> >> \ifnum\XeTeXcountvariations\font>0\fi\bye
> > 
> > :)
> > Phew! Glad to hear that (for once) it’s not fontspec that is broken!
> 
> Well, I have now worked through my entire collection of.ttc fonts, and
> cannot find one that returns > 0 for \XeTeXcountvariations.  Can anyone
> let me have a copy of such a font (installable under Windows, of course)
> so that I can experience at first hand the problem(s) that such fonts
> can cause ?

Font variations is a feature of Apple’s AAT[1], and there is actually only
a single publicly available font which has them[2] AFAIK. Anyway, XeTeX
in TL 2015 dropped support for font variation entirely as xdvipdfmx does
not support them, so \XeTeXcountvariations always returns 0 now.

Regards,
Khaled

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Typography
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skia_(typeface)