[XeTeX] detection of absent characters within a font

[Hans Hagen]

Adam Lindsay wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> As basic ConTeXt/XeTeX support is mostly under control now, I was looking
> to enable some "extras".
> 
> The first was detecting whether or not a character is present in the
> current font. I tried checking the width of a scratchbox with the
> character, but it *doesn't* have zero width when the font is missing that
> character, in my tests this morning. (No, for this application, I'm not
> too fussed about combining diacriticals.)
> 
> Widths didn't work. Is there any other indicator that a character is
> missing in action?

take a look at the etex manual, there are \fontchar* and \iffontchar primitives

Hans


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