[tex-live] inclusion of libraries

Jonathan Kew jonathan_kew at sil.org
Wed May 24 22:08:21 CEST 2006


On 24 May 2006, at 8:39 pm, Ralf Stubner wrote:

> Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org> writes:
>
>> Additional ways to locate "uninstalled" fonts (those unknown to the
>> GUI environment) are under consideration, however, as there are a
>> variety of situations where this could be useful.
>
> Particularly for TeX Live it would be useful if one could say  
> something
> like \font\x="lmroman10-regular.otf" and XeTeX would then use kpathsea
> to search for the font by its file name. I don't know if the other
> situations you are refering to could be catered for with this  
> approach,
> too.

Yes, this is one of the possible extensions, and easy to implement.

It may not be the best or only approach, though; for example, it  
doesn't provide a way to access entire families of fonts, only one  
specific face.

One handy feature of XeTeX is that it can choose the appropriate face  
from a family such as Brioso Pro based on the point size, so  \font 
\x="Brioso Pro" at 7pt  actually gives you Brioso Pro Caption, while   
\font\x="Brioso Pro" at 14pt  gives you Brioso Pro Subhead, etc. (by  
default, unless the user chooses to override optical sizing). But to  
do this, it needs knowledge of all the fonts in the family, not just  
the name of one file. It would be very nice if Latin Modern gained an  
OpenType 'opsz' feature some day, given that there are plenty of  
optical sizes already designed, and we'd want XeTeX to be able to  
make use of it.

The fontspec package (integration of LaTeX/NFSS with XeTeX) also  
relies on XeTeX's ability to find style variants (bold and italic) of  
a given face, so that  \setromanfont{Adobe Garamond Pro}  results in  
the proper styles for \itshape and \bfshape, for example. Again, this  
implies knowledge of the whole family, not just a single named font  
file.

Anyhow, all this is an area where there's still room for further  
development.... :)

JK



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