Open Type trickery [was Re: Encoding and mapping glyphs from an expert font

[Idris Samawi Hamid <ishamid@colostate.edu>]

On Sun, 10 Apr 2005 00:22:31 +0100, Adam Lindsay <atl@comp.lancs.ac.uk> 
wrote:

> But wait, where are you coming from? Are your source fonts really Minion
> .pfbs, or are they from OpenType? With OpenType, you can use some nice
> TeXFont stuff to select the features (OSF, SC, alternates) without having
> to draw from two arbitrary encodings.

I am very interested in the Open Type trickery. I have been wrestling for 
quite some time about the problem of multiple accents over ligatures in 
Arabic. I can do it in Aleph but the present procedure (due originally to 
Yannis) is much too slow and cumbersome, especially when dealing with huge 
fonts (my present virtual ovf has about 10,000 characters!). I finally 
found a solution that OpenType might help with--multiple glyphs for one 
character. I can implement this without OpenType, but OpenType opens the 
possiblity for word searches in Acrobat of Arabic text, something that is 
well-nigh impossible with the usual pfb approach.

While we will still need huge fonts, the processing of complicated accents 
should be much faster with the approach I have in mind (smaller otp's and 
ovf's). Do you think TeXFont can be tweaked to generate ovf's and ofm's as 
well?

Take care
Idris

-- 
Professor Idris Samawi Hamid
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523