Re: XeTeX 1.0 wishlist: \fontdimen's

Hi Will,

On 31 Oct 2005, at 7:05 am, Will Robertson wrote:

> Hi Jonathan,
>
> This is just a small issue, really, but if you're chasing down  
> little things for a 1.0 release then perhaps it qualifies.
>
> We've spoken before, I think, about how XeTeX isn't very good a  
> filling in \fontdimen values for non-tfm fonts. I also know that in  
> many cases they're not even relevant for fonts that are loaded. But  
> having them would be nice, and they can be ignored in non-Latin font.

True.

> I'm especially interested in two: \fontdimen1 and \fontdimen5,  
> slant and ex-height. (I'm quite happy with \fontdimen6 = point  
> size.) For the first, this information might not be available to  
> you, but not setting it breaks LaTeX's ability to nest \emph{}s;  
> I'll be including a fix for this in the next version of fontspec,  
> but I can see it being useful in other circumstances also.

I think I should be able to get a slant value, in most cases at  
least. The information is supposed to be in the fonts, so I just need  
to take the trouble to read it.


> For the ex-height of a font, this is closely linked with not  
> knowing the height of the boxes passed to XeTeX. I'm not asking for  
> the latter (although I reiterate it'd be nice to have via a  
> character height-measuring primitive), but measuring the height of  
> an "x" (or maybe a different character, or maybe an average of a  
> few) when the font is loaded would be quite useful, in my opinion.

As we've discussed before, this one is trickier, I think, but I can  
see it would be useful. I'll take a look at the options and see what  
I can come up with. Thanks for the reminders! :)

JK