[XeTeX] Question about emulated font features.
Jonathan Kew
jonathan_kew at sil.org
Wed Dec 19 22:21:47 CET 2007
On 19 Dec 2007, at 8:46 pm, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> First off, I want to say that I have absolutely been happy so far with
> my use of XeTeX, and it has filled a hole in what I have wanted out of
> the eTeX software that I have been using up until I found this.
Glad you like it! :)
> However, there is a slight issue that I have not with XeTeX, but with
> many of the fonts that I use: They do not support OpenType
> features, do
> not have variants for things like old-style numbers, small caps, etc.
Yes, this is true of many older fonts, especially those that that are
simply repackaged versions of old Type 1 fonts.
> I was wondering if these font features can be emulated (of course
> at the
> cost of appearance) in XeTeX/XeLaTeX, by XeTex itself, or if there
> need
> to be some sort of complex macros developed in order to do it.
There is not currently any support (or any specific plans) for this
within XeTeX; it aims to provide direct access to whatever the font
offers, but does not "fake" things that the font lacks.
> Also, I
> would be interested in emulating the slanted (not italic) letter
> style;
> is this also possible?
There is support in XeTeX 0.997 (the development code in Subversion)
for "slant" and "extend" pseudo-features; with this version,
\font\sxcharis = "Charis SIL:slant=0.2;extend=1.5" at 12pt
will give a slanted, extended version of Charis SIL.
If you're running 0.996 (the TeX Live 2007 release version), this was
not yet implemented at that time.
JK
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