[XeTeX] asterism

[Ross Moore]

Hi Benct, Khaled, Joel,

On 17/01/2010, at 9:23 PM, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

> Khaled Hosny skrev:
>> On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 07:56:19PM -0500, Joel C. Salomon wrote:
>

> It seems to me it would be easier to just create a font
> containing just a U+2042 character.  I realize there might
> be a license problem, but asterisks don't look that different
> between fonts; it should be possible to find a suitable free
> font to copy and if needed scale the outline from.

Hmm; I don't think that I can agree with this.
Look at the variation in the attached PDF.

In each line, the first asterism is constructed, whereas the 2nd
(if present) is drawn from the font itself.
The asterisks vary from a 5-pointed star to 8-points (in Code2000).
Furthermore, the spacing between stars in the asterism, and the
overall vertical placement has significant variation.
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That PDF was made with XeTeX + xdvipdfmx 0.4 .
/ActualText is used with the constructed asterism.
I see no problem with the placement when extracting text
by Copy/Paste from Adobe Reader.
With Poppler-based  pdftotext  it is a bit of a mess,
unless you use  pdftotext -raw  .


>
> /BP 8^)>
> -- 
> Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se


Hope this helps,

	Ross

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Ross Moore                                       ross at maths.mq.edu.au
Mathematics Department                           office: E7A-419
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