[XeTeX] Font strangeness

[Jonathan Kew]

On 24 May 2005, at 12:41 am, Stephen Moye wrote:

> The following bit of plain TeX is used to fit some text into a given 
> space. Everything works fine with every other OpenType font I have. 
> There seems to be a problem with the new Adobe Garamond Premium Pro. 
> For some reason that I cannot fathom the resulting text is 
> considerably shorter than it should be. Any ideas?
>

I don't have that font, so can't attempt to reproduce whatever you're 
seeing. But I have a guess: does this font have a range of optical 
sizes? If so, it won't scale linearly as you might expect, because 
XeTeX will pick the most appropriate face from the set for the size you 
request.

You can disable this behavior by adding "/S=0" to the font name, and 
then it will simply use the face named in the \font command. Or you can 
use "/S=##" where ## is the desired optical size if you want to use 
(even if that differs from the "at size"). Thus, \font\x="Garamond 
Premier Pro/S=36" at .1pt will load whatever optical face of GPP would 
be used at 36pt, but scaled to 0.1pt.

Assuming that's the cause of your problem, you could be sophisticated 
and use a two-step solution: first an approximation to select a 
suitable optical face, then re-measure using that size with /S=## in 
order to calculate the exact scaling to use.

HTH,   JK