[XeTeX] fontspec limits

[Jonathan Kew]

On 17 Dec 2004, at 5:56 am, Will Robertson wrote:

> Hi
>
> It's been on my list of things to do (actually, I never wrote it down, 
> but it's been in the back of my head) to see how many times I can run 
> \fontspec before something goes wrong.
>
> After being run for the first time, a fontspec command with constant 
> arguments does little except choose the already defined font. The 
> problem is that you can only call the \font command so many times 
> before XeTeX bottoms out, and this is necessary in the current version 
> of the package every time \fontspec is called. This minimal example 
> fails somewhere near the end:
>

Thanks for bringing this up, I hadn't tried such a loop. I notice that:

    \newcount\zfcount
    \loop\advance\zfcount by 1
    \font\1=cmr10 \1
    font test \number\zfcount\endgraf
    \ifnum\zfcount < 2000 \repeat
    \end

works fine (i.e., repeatedly specifying a tfm-based font), but a 
similar example with an AAT font fails:

    \newcount\zfcount
    \loop\advance\zfcount by 1
    \font\1="Times Roman" \1
    font test \number\zfcount\endgraf
    \ifnum\zfcount < 2000 \repeat
    \end

I'd consider this a XeTeX bug, and will see what I can do to correct it.

JK