[XeTeX] Ligatures and things

[John Was]

Hello all

I'm still experiencing some trouble with XeTeX (run in plain TeX rather than LaTeX) and fonts on my Windows system.  When accessing fonts that show up normally in Windows applications such as Word I find some of them work while others crash XeTeX, without any obvious common factor.  Not much of a worry since the ones that do the crashing are not generally fonts that I want to use anyway.  In trying out the outline font Minion Pro (the version that comes with Adobe Acrobat Reader, located in its Resource directory), which I _would_ probably want to use, I find - as per an early message of mine - that XeTeX crashes if I use the font name but not if I go directly to the .otf font file using square brackets round the file name.  Again this doesn't much bother me (except that I'd like to know why it happens!), but I've now found that although the five standard ligatures are achieved automatically (ff, fi etc.), the en and em dashes are not picked up either by the usual -- and --- or by explicitly using an ASCII en or em dash in the input file (-- and --- just give double and triple hyphens in the PDF, the true en and em dashes both give single hyphens).

Is there any way to make XeTeX see the dashes automatically?  I've just discovered that they don't work in Times New Roman either, which is usually a pretty reliable font to test things on.  I have a nasty feeling that I'm going to have trouble with quotation marks too!

Relatedly, is there some extended version of testfont.tex that would generate a PDF of all the characters in a given font?  (The helpful PDF guide to XeTeX by Jonathan Kew in the TeXLive distribution mentions a number of sample .TEX files that might  be of help here, but I can't find any of them, either in TeXLive or indeed anywhere at all on the Internet: they have perhaps been withdrawn in the current version.)

Best


John
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