[OS X TeX] Zapfino install progress, ``Peace on Earth'' card

[William F. Adams]

On Monday, March 22, 2004, at 07:36  PM, Will Robertson wrote:

> Without knowing anything about your work over the last few months, 
> this sounds incredible. Imagine TeX going from 
> all-but-impossible-to-write-good-Zapfino to 
> so-much-better-that-MacOSX-itself. Fantastic work!

Thanks, it's been a _lot_ of work (work which arguably I should've 
managed for TUG2001, but hind sight is 20-20 and all that).

However, it's just more convenient / easier than Mac OS X itself --- 
one _can_ get at all of Zapfino in Mac OS X (>= Jaguar) by installing 
the Unicode glyph palette, scrolling through it for alternates and 
double-clicking madly to place them all. (Now if I'd managed to work 
this up before Jaguar came out....)

Here's a re-cap which I wrote up on comp.text.tex (my apologies to 
those seeing this a second time --- it's edited / up-dated / improved 
though):

> Short version:
>
>  - I created a tagged text file to flow into Adobe InDesign
>  - I exported each page as a .eps
>  - I wrote a pair of virtual fonts and created an encoding scheme to 
> encompass
> all possible trigraphs as well as 32 variations for each (unaccented) 
> letter in
> the Latin alphabet and wrote an Omega Translation Process to 
> contextually
> select alternates and ligatures for a (hopefully) nice result.
>
> Then I just set the text in Omega, used odvips to pull in all the .eps 
> files,
> distilled the resultant ~38 _MB_ .ps file w/ Adobe Acrobat et voila!

W/ the additional new translations I garnered from Typo-L and 
comp.text.tex, the .ps file is up to ~80MB now....

Wendy then said:
> Beautiful indeed.

Thanks!

> Will we be able to just have an Omega template preset in TeXshop
> and ask Dick to add the format into this menu  and simply
> typeset the document?

I'm planning on having the setup be _very_ straightforward --- 
hopefully I can manage to create a LaTeX package so that it'll be just 
a matter of

...
\usepackage{omegazapfino}
...
\ZapfinoText{This would be typeset in Zapfino w/ contextual ligatures.}
\ZapfinoRebus{This would have ornaments / pictures for words like 
(-(duck)-) and (-(pen)-)}

I still need to work up a markup scheme for accessing arbitrary 
alternates and swashes though.

I've pretty much decided on the paren hyphen paren scheme for marking 
rebus text. That way one could turn it off for proofing by searching / 
replacing (-( w/ (~(, though I guess w/ a LaTeX package the correct 
thing to do would be to have it honour the ``draft'' option in the 
documentclass if present and set text then.

For swashes I was thinking something along the lines of:
----a (that'd be the first level)
+----a (second)
++----a (third)
+++----a (fourth)

\----a (a swash from the upward direction)
/----a (a swash from the downward)

and reversing everything for forms appropriate to the ends of words --- 
does that sound okay?

That way I could run checks (moving the em and en dashes to the end of 
the OTP) to remove them when they were added for letterforms w/ lacked 
such.

That leaves the matter of alternates in the middle of words... perhaps 
the paren-hyphen-paren option would work for that?

Hmm, co(-(g)-)ent --- is that too ugly?

co(--(g)--)ent

co(---(g)---)ent

That's not so bad, is it?

Then again, Zapfino has up to _eight_ styles for some letters.... so 
counting all those hyphens might get kind of tedious.

> Are you running this with this version?
>
> This is Omegak, Version 3.141592--1.23.2.2 (Web2C 7.5.2)
>  %&-line parsing enabled.
> Copyright (c) 1994--2000 John Plaice and Yannis Haralambous

No, but your're right, I need to try that again. In the meanwhile, I'm 
hoping that Gerben will be able to compile and create an iInstaller 
package for Bilotta's Aleph. I believe that'll be more expedient for 
the short term. Once Yannis and John have an updated version, we can 
see where that's at---it'll be nice to have both as options.

William

-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com

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