[XeTeX] chess fonts with xelatex

[Ulrike Fischer]

Hello,

I'm the author of chessfss, a package that allows the use of
different chess fonts in a document through a normal nfss-font
selection sheme. 

I also maintain a package (enpassant) which contains support files
for quite a lot free (mostly true type) chess fonts. 

During the last weeks I made some test with the chess fonts and
xelatex on miktex 2.7. Apart from the fact that I found two bugs in
(x)dvipdfmx triggered by the skaknew and the alphadia font
everything worked: Xetex used the fonts installed in the texmf tree
without problems.

I was now wondering if I could add some support for ttf chess fonts
installed in the normal (windows) fonts folder. To be able to do it
I must somehow reencode the fonts.   

Unicode can not be used as chess fonts are highly unstandard. Most
chars don't have a unicode number. Also the different authors of the
fonts did put the chars quite randomly in the character table and
also used various glyphs name.
So in the psfonts.map almost every font has its own encoding vector:

chess-pirat-lsf ChessFigurinePirat " ChessPiratFigEncoding
ReEncodeFont " <chess-pirat-fig.enc <chess-pirat-fig-raw.pfb

How could such reencoding be done with XeTeX if the fonts are in the
system font folder? 

-- 
Ulrike Fischer