[XeTeX] Adobe Kepler Std: Extraneous space always inserted between left paren and f

[Taylor Venable]

On Sat, 2010-02-20 at 23:50 -0500, David Perry wrote:
> Do you have any other fonts that support OT features like ligatures? 
> Other Adobe fonts would perhaps be the best test.  If they work, then 
> it's probably not a XeTeX problem.

I do, and they all work well, fortunately.  Just this one font is being
problematic, and if it weren't for the fact that I type "(for example)"
way too often I wouldn't mind much. :-)

> The best test would be to try Kepler Pro in another application that 
> supports OT.  If you are on Linux, you may not have anything but XeTeX; 
> on Mac you can try TextEdit or Pages, or most of the Adobe apps 
> (InDesign, Illustrator, etc), which are cross-platform.  If Kepler Pro 
> does work properly in other OT-aware apps that can generate PDF, then we 
> do need to look at XeTeX again.  I don't have Kepler so I can't help much.

OK, so I found that Abiword (a WYSIWYG word processor) supports OpenType
fonts, and although it can't turn most of the features on/off it also
exhibits the problem both in the visual layout (when entering text) and
when saving to PDF.  However, Emacs is also capable of using OpenType
fonts and produces it correctly (no extra space).  In GTK programs
generally it's wrong, and in Qt programs it is wrong unless I highlight
(select) the text, in which case it changes to be correct - the width of
the text as a whole changes.

Knowing that, it seems that XeTeX specifically is not at fault, or if it
is then it's a really common issue.  I wonder if the blame lies in the
font itself or in the layout system somewhere... hopefully I'll be able
to secure an update to the latest version of the font files soon, and
if/when I do I'll report back on any differences.  We have some Macs at
work so I'll try to reproduce it there using Apple's layout engine.

Thanks for the ideas.

-- 
Taylor Venable
http://metasyntax.net/