[XeTeX] On cross-language font selection

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 14 févr. 07 à 05:48, Jjgod Jiang a écrit :

> 3) Create a (native) virtual font scheme.
>
> 4) Something I'm going to talk about in this mail.
>
> First of all, I think we could introduce a new concept call "font
> selection scheme" into XeTeX, which, basically, is a list of rules:
>
> 0       - 128    : Latin Modern     % ASCII characters
> 0x4e00  - 0x9fbb : Adobe Song Std   % CJK Unified Ideographs
> 0x20000 - 0x2a6d6: Sun-ExtB         % CJK Unified Ideographs  
> Extension B
>
> (When we record those rules in memory, we can use Unicode as ranges,
> but when specifying them, we may use symbolic ranges like "CJK Unified
> Ideographs" or "Fullwidth Latin Characters")
>
> Then we can introduce a new primitive to XeTeX, called \scheme, to  
> define
> rules like this:
>
> \scheme\MixLMandSong{Latin: Latin Modern,
>                      CJK Unified Ideographs: Adobe Song Std,
>                      CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B: Sun-ExtB}

Isn't it more or less (but with a simpler interface) the way Omega  
works already, which introduces Unicode virtual fonts grouping  
together several actual fonts so as to fill in the whole Unicode  
range? I imagine font specialists would retort this will produce less  
than ideal aesthetic results, results that are not typographically  
consistent.

Bruno Voisin