[XeTeX] Eadui font (and contextual alternates)

[Khaled Hosny]

On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 05:32:38PM -0400, David Perry wrote:
> Thanks to Peter for creating and releasing this font.  Eadui is an
> amazing piece of work.  If you have a serious interest in what can
> be done with OT features, you should at least look at the PDF
> documentation if you didn't do so before.  And thanks to XeTeX
> (along with fontspec) for giving Windows and Linux users access to
> advanced typography; that's why I decided to learn Xe(La)TeX.
> 
> I used Eadui to set a sample text in the book I'm currently
> finishing. One issue came up during that process: the contextual
> alternates (calt) feature should be on by default, according to the
> OpenType spec; but it isn't in XeTeX.  Why not?  Can/Should that be
> changed?

OpenType implementation usually follow MS recommendations for each
script, not the UI recommendation in the OT feature registry.

So for Latin, the default features are defined in:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/standot/features.aspx

Which doesn't include calt, compare it with Arabic, for example:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/arabicot/features.aspx

(Don't ask me why MS and OpenType implementors did so.)

Regards,
 Khaled

> 
> David
> 
> Peter Baker wrote:
> >Many thanks to those who tested my Eadui font, which tries to
> >faithfully reproduce the English Caroline Minuscule hand of the
> >eleventh-century Canterbury scribe Eadui Basan. I've released
> >version 1.0 under the Open Font License on the Open Font Library
> >website:
> >
> >http://openfontlibrary.org/files/psb6m/177
> >
> >Many OpenType features: all the heavy testing was done in XeTeX.
> >
> >Happy summer to all,
> >Peter Baker
> >
> >
> >
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-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer