[XeTeX] Re: [MacTeX] Re: A Zapfish request (was Re: [] XeTeX)

[Jonathan Kew]

On 14 Apr 2004, at 5:10 pm, William F. Adams wrote:

> There's not much I can add to Jonathan's erudite commentary.
>
> I will note that until something is worked out, we'll have to get in 
> the habit of replacing ' with ’ in our source (and `` with “ and '' 
> with ” and ` with ’ ) when using xetex.

True; and that's entirely in the spirit of XeTeX, which expects Unicode 
text as input. Given that Unicode provides a far richer character set 
than ASCII, it is no longer appropriate to use some of these old 
techniques to represent characters not available in the ASCII set.

I suppose another possibility is to use ' and ", along with an AAT font 
such as Hoefler Text that supports a "smart quotes" feature. :-)

> Just out of curiousity Jonathan, have you considered supporting Omega 
> Translation Processes? Doing so would be a pretty cool way to provide 
> a facility to customize the usage for a given font (I'm gonna get 
> pretty tired of always specifying ...r{}th in Zapfino (I think the rt 
> ligature followed by an h (or pretty much any other letter) looks 
> weird).

No, I haven't. Well, I suppose you could say I've considered it; but I 
don't want to go there.

I'm not sure how this would play together with the fact that xetex is 
dealing with sequences of Unicode characters, which it will ultimately 
hand over to ATSUI for rendering. Would you expect OTPs to act at the 
Unicode character level? If so, there's still a potentially complex 
layer of behavior "underneath" this that you don't have full control 
over. Or are you thinking that they'd map all the way to glyphs? That's 
more the Omega way--but it's a whole different world-view from xetex's, 
and I'm not sure how well they'd integrate.

 From an ATSUI point of view, it should really be the font designer who 
decides, and then encodes in AAT tables, the appropriate contexts for 
the rt ligature to be used. It should be extremely rare that a user has 
reason to explicitly override the font designer's wishes. (Apparently, 
in this particular case, you disagree with the font developer's 
choice.)

Omega lets you take on this aspect of the font design task, by writing 
custom OTPs to get the particular contextual behavior you want. The 
equivalent in the xetex world would be to write custom AAT tables for 
the font; that's what I'd probably do if I wanted Zapfino to behave 
differently. (Of course, there may be licensing concerns with this; I 
haven't looked into the question. But in principle, that's the way to 
do it.)

XeTeX was intended to make it simple to use the advanced typography 
features of OS X, with no special setup required. I doubt it does 
anything that you couldn't also do with Omega, in a 
platform-independent manner, if you're prepared to put the effort into 
it, and then you get to make all the decisions for yourself. If you 
want that level of control, and have the expertise to do so, use Omega. 
If you want to simply use AAT fonts as provided, XeTeX tries to make it 
easy.

Jonathan

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