[XeTeX] Defining multiple fonts / font search directory

[Gerrit Sangel]

Hello,

I have two propositions for new features (I hope, they are not yet encoded)

What about a kind of font substition?

I think, it would be nice if one could e.g. specify two fonts (in XeLaTeX, I 
don't know how this works in XeteX) like this
\useromanfont{font1,font2}

This way, the system would first choose a glyph from font1 and if it doesn't 
find one in font1, it would look in font2. I think, this would maybe nice for 
Chinese if one uses characters from the Han blocks in Plane 0 and Plane 2, 
which may not fit into one font (don't know if something like this exists). 
This would also be good if one has to input other scripts more often and does 
not want to type in a command everytime.

Another proposition would be this:

I thought about long time archiving, which is one advanage of LaTeX. With 
XeTeX now, the user has to install the font on the system, which is, in my 
opinion, not so good for long time archiving. What about a search path in the 
current directory, for which the user gets the feature to specifiy the font 
file directly? I think, if one would use maybe something like 
\useromanfont{font1.ttf}, XeTeX could look for the font in the current 
directory, where the .tex file is located. Then one could save the font file 
along with the tex file and if he wants to compile the font, he does not have 
to care about installing the font (or maybe isn't even allowed to do so)

Gerrit