[XeTeX] Unicode/font mixing

[Jonathan Kew]

On 24 Jan 2005, at 1:51 pm, Simon Spiegel wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I already posted a similar question on the regular OSX LaTeX mailing 
> list, but I thought maybe a post here would be useful as well. To make 
> it short: Is it possible to have a font only for a certain part of the 
> Unicode encoding? Can I, for example, use Adobe Garamond Pro for the 
> Latin encodings, and Times Roman for Cyrillic and Hebrew? I know that 
> i can switch the fonts by hand, but can I setup XeLaTeX in a way that 
> it automatically switches to another font with more glyphs if the 
> first font isn't able to display everything?
>

No, there's no way to make this "magically" happen.

If you insist on doing it, and don't mind (a) some tricky (and probably 
fragile) TeX macro programming, and (b) a performance hit, then you 
could write macros that switch fonts depending on the characters 
encountered, by making all text characters that aren't supported by the 
current font into "active character" macros that switch to an 
appropriate new font before typesetting themselves (and at the same 
time activate a new set of definitions, so that the font will change 
back again when needed).

I really wouldn't recommend it, though.

JK