[OS X TeX] Re: MacOSX-TeX Digest #1789 - 07/12/06

[S P Suresh]

Hi,

We managed to get Minion Pro and Myriad Pro working with xelatex, and  
it is a breeze. Thanks very much for the help.

--Suresh

On 13-Jul-06, at 5:30 AM, TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List wrote:

> Subject: Re: [OS X TeX] Fwd: Using a ttf font with separate  
> ligatures in xelatex
> From: "Jonathan Kew" <jonathan_kew at sil.org>
> Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 10:03:58 +0100
>
> On 12 Jul 2006, at 9:48 am, S P Suresh wrote:
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> One of my friends has the following doubt regarding xelatex (he
>> uses Linux), and I do not know any other place to look for help.
>
> A better place to look for help would be the XeTeX mailing list; see
> <http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex>.
>
> But having said that, see below...
>
>>>
>>> I am trying to use "Minion Regular", a Windows TTF font, in
>>> xelatex.  The font comes as two separate files:
>>>
>>> 1. Minion Regular        : Contains the normal symbols
>>> 2. Minion Expert Regular : Has ligatures and old style numerals
>>>
>>> My problem is the following: How do I tell xelatex that the
>>> ligatures for Minion Regular are to be found in Minion Expert
>>> Regular?  If I just use Minion Regular without any additional
>>> information, xelatex does not generate any ligatures.
>>>
>>> I have found directives in fontspec.sty to tell xelatex about
>>> which font to use for BoldFace, Italics etc, but I have not found
>>> any mechanism to specify an auxiliary file for ligatures.
>>>
>>> Any ideas?
>
> You can't do this (except, I suppose, by the nightmare approach of
> handling it all in TeX macros with active characters, etc., and
> switching fonts as needed, but that's a ridiculous idea).
>
> XeTeX relies on OpenType tables to provide the information to access
> ligatures, alternate numerals, etc. This version of Minion appears to
> be a pre-OpenType legacy font, and so XeTeX will not do anything
> special with it. There is no way for XeTeX to know that certain
> "Minion Regular" glyphs (numerals, character pairs, etc.) could be
> replaced with entirely different glyphs from "Minion Expert Regular".
> As far as the software is concerned, these are two unrelated fonts,
> and the only way to access the "Expert" font would be by manually
> selecting it.
>
> I believe Minion Pro is available (free) with current versions of
> Adobe Reader, so upgrading to a modern OpenType font should be fairly
> straightforward.
>
> JK
>
>

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