On Sun, 20 Feb 2011, Khaled Hosny wrote: > I lost track of what the original issue is, so I tried testing your > example with a little modification (removing default font feature and > using different font), and all monspaced fonts I tried are giving me, > guess what, monospaced results. Now I'm more confused.
In September of last year I had the issue that my inter-sentence spaces were wrong, with a commercial monospace font used at only one size. I asked on this list and was told about the WordSpace option to fontspec, which also led me to discover the PunctuationSpace option. That thread starts here: http://tug.org/mailman/htdig/xetex/2010-September/018463.html After that I made a general practice of using WordSpace and PunctuationSpace when using monospace fonts. The new problem arose when, in a different project, I wanted to also scale the fonts with the LaTeX size commands. So I wrote something like this: \fontspec[WordSpace={1,0,0},PunctuationSpace=3]{FontName} small text \Large large text and I found that the space in "large text" was too small - it was the same size as the space in "small text," not having scaled when the font scaled. Everything subsequent to that flows from attempting to get that scenario to work without breaking other things. The workaround of not using WordSpace allows the space to scale properly, but then it becomes stretchable. Things that could remove the stretchability seem like they must be repeated for every size change. And so on. And it's less than perfect that I have to do any special configuration at all. Non-stretchable word space equal to the fixed width of the font, and extra punctuation space of either zero or also equal to the fixed width of the font, are the only things that make sense as defaults for monospace fonts. (Yes, it's easy to imagine someone could want something else, like double-justification of monospace, but that's not a sensible *default*.) If XeTeX can get monospace right by default for older fonts like CMTT but not for OpenType fonts, then XeTeX isn't as compatible with OpenType as I wish it could be. My immediate problem is solved. I can live with the workaround of using the everysel package to add code at every font selection to reset the stretchability and shrinkability to zero. However, I think fontspec should be changed to remember the WordSpace settings as multipliers rather than as lengths, and to recalculate the multiplication at every size change. That would allow my original code to work as intended; it would also be consistent with the current documentation of fontspec, which says the WordSpace settings are multipliers applied to the default widths, implying that the results of the multiplication change when the default widths change; and it would allow for others with more complicated requirements than mine to get what they want in a clean way (for instance, typesetting documents that contain monospace fonts but aren't ENTIRELY written with monospace fonts). The same "remember the multiplier instead of the result of multiplication" should apply to PunctuationSpace as well. A more speculative wishlist item would be that the XeTeX engine should recognize when a font is monospace, and set the default fontdimens in that case to stretchability and shrinkability zero, extra space equal to word space. A bitter argument exists about whether a sentence space in a monospace setting should be equal to one or two word spaces (I prefer two), but I don't think anybody would seriously claim that it should default to a non-integer number of word spaces; nonetheless 1.333 is the current default. However, recognizing monospace fonts would require the XeTeX engine to be *able* to recognize monospace fonts, which seems to be a harder problem than it ought to be; and it could also break existing documents that rely on the existing, broken, default widths. -- Matthew Skala msk...@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca People before principles. http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/ -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
