MinionPro-Regular and Ornaments

[Wlodek Bzyl]

Hi

MinionPro-Regular.otf OpenType font distributed with AdobeReader
contains several nice ornamental shapes (in positions 57525+)
and one of the features of MinionPro is `ornm' (Ornaments).

What is the difference between

\font \X = "MinionPro-Regular"

and

\font \X = "MinionPro-Regular:+ornm"


Regards

--Wlodek Bzyl

[Adam Twardoch]

Post by Wlodek Bzyl
\font \X = "MinionPro-Regular:+ornm"

The ornm feature allows replacing the bullet character (U+2022) with one
out of many ornaments (GSUB lookup type 3). Unfortunately, XeTeX
currently only supports the first variant returned by that lookup type
rather than allowing the user to select which variants to use.
Therefore, at this moment, the ornm feature as implemented by Adobe is
not very useful.

Regards,
Adam

[Will Robertson]

Unfortunately, XeTeX currently only supports the first variant
returned by [GSUB lookup type 3] rather than allowing the user to
select which variants to use. Therefore, at this moment, the ornm
feature as implemented by Adobe is not very useful.

I was asked parenthetically about this, Jonathan. Is there any hope
for ICU being able to support these types of things?

Cheers,

Will

[Jonathan Kew]

Post by Will Robertson

Unfortunately, XeTeX currently only supports the first variant
returned by [GSUB lookup type 3] rather than allowing the user to
select which variants to use. Therefore, at this moment, the ornm
feature as implemented by Adobe is not very useful.

I was asked parenthetically about this, Jonathan. Is there any hope
for ICU being able to support these types of things?

Well, anything's possible.... just a Small Matter Of Programming. :)

As of ICU 3.4 (the release XeTeX is currently using), there's not
even a general API to activate/deactivate features, only a couple of
flags that can be set for the layout engine -- one for kerning, one
for ligatures. So I've extended this already, to support activation
of arbitrary features. But supporting one-of-many features would
require a further extension to pass the selected value down into the
lower levels of the engine.

If ICU itself is extended in this way, obviously I'd expect to
support it in XeTeX. Otherwise, it's on my mental "to-do" list, but
other things are currently more urgent -- like the crashes some Linux
users have reported with certain fonts, and some of the unfinished
aspects of xdvipdfmx.

JK