[XeTeX] bold small caps, but no regular small caps

[Khaled Hosny]

On Thu, Aug 01, 2013 at 12:06:43PM +0200, Georg Duffner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> XeTeX’s behaviour in this case is mysterious.
> 
> I tried Mike’s original tex file and got no smallcaps at all. After
> updating Charis to 4.114 (from 4.106) I got the same behaviour as
> him: no smallcaps with regular but with bold yes. When I tried again
> today, there are no smallcaps at all – I suppose, after the update
> on monday, the old version stayed in the cache and confused XeTeX’s
> rendering choice(?), while today the cache was rebuilt without the
> old files, thus XeTeX stays with graphite.

No idea, but having suffered from mysterious Windows font installation
issues before (not with XeTeX), I’ve learned to delete the existing
font(s) before installing a new version.

> Now, if I extend Mike’s original example by italics (see below),
> things get weirder: what is expected to be italic smallcaps is
> rendered upright (see attachment). Is this another bug in XeTeX?

No idea, here I get no smallcaps at all on the first line, and proper
smallcaps on the second one, so it seems another manifestation of the
confusion caused by installing multiple font versions. May be we should
give priority to fonts with higher version numbers in case of
duplicates, though I’m not sure if this would help the Windows issue.

Can you attach the XDV files from your example, by using --no-pdf option
(which reminds me to finish XDV support in dviasm and publish it so
people can examine XDV files themselves).

> And just to make sure that I understand correctly,
> \addfontfeature{RawFeature=+smcp} as in the second line does work as
> expected, because the graphite feature in this case is named "smcp"
> like the OT feature?

Yes (fontspec fails because it first checks if the font supports the
given feature and if not it removes it from font definition, and since
it is looking for OpenType features it finds none when Graphite shaper
is used).

Regards,
Khaled