Re: [NTG-context] Small caps problem/bug with some fonts

19 Sep 2009

      Barry Schwartz wrote:
...
Hans Hagen  skribis:
...
Barry Schwartz wrote:
...
If base mode uses the traditional TeX mechanism for ligatures, I don't
see any way the font can be blamed.
Ant does the same thing, I believe, using the OT tables and heuristics
to run the TeX processor. That's okay, as long as the results aren't
blamed on the font. :)
well, that's alway sa bit hard to determine, maybe not in this case but 
there definitely are dubious cases and heuristics that works in one case 
migh tfail in another; also, as context base mode is mostly meant for 
simple cases (and as said, it might be wise in the case of snallcaps to 
not enable ligatures) and therefore suits most cases, but as reference 
(and for more advanced work) node mode has to be used ... actually, when 
users report bugs with fonts i kind of assume node mode

in the perspective of the oriental tex project (related to luatex/mkiv) 
a complex font is being made and quite some time goes into figuring out 
what exactly the common ground in ot is (we've decided to settle for 
uniscribe/volt for final decisions as that's the most advanced machinery)

for instance there are more combinations possible on otf than the font 
generating programs can handle and some combinations are only handled by 
some renderers. of course the mkiv machinery can be blamed for much, but 
so can the specification itself, the font generating tools as wel as fonts

the best we can do is to try to deal with all but eventually i think 
that i'll end up with a couple of extra features / checks / etc; there's 
also already a patch mechanism in place

having more advanced fonts is nice, but unfortunately (for commercial 
reasons, or for stability reasons or ...) font vendors have no real bug 
fix and upgrade policy but at least i can fix my own bugs -)

btw, in most cases it helps to nail down problems when we have the font, 
which not always is the case, so in such cases we might need to gamble 
where the problem sits

Hans

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