Fun with XeTeX and Fonts
XeTeX is an improvement upon the famous typesetting system TeX. XeTeX provides Unicode support and native support for standard fonts.
Unfortunately, XeTeX is fairly poorly documented. Here are some interesting findings I have come across (some particular to XeTeX, others just general ideas for TeX and LaTeX).
Ornament Symbols
I wanted to access the various ornament symbols in the Zapfino font. The standard font selection package, fontspec.sty, lacks support for such ornaments. So, to get support for ornaments, you must first teach the package about them.This is done by including the following line in the preamble:
\newAATfeature{Ornaments}{Pi}{16}{2}Then, to use ornaments, include Ornaments=Pi in the appropriate \fontspec or similar declaration.
The numbers 16 and 2 are Apple’s AAT codes for the ornaments (see the C structure at the bottom of that page).
For example, as requested:
\documentclass[11pt]{article} \usepackage{xunicode} \usepackage{fontspec} \newcommand\ScriptFont{Zapfino} \newAATfeature{Ornaments}{Pi}{16}{2} \begin{document} \fontspec[Ornaments=Pi]{\ScriptFont} ABCDEFG \end{document}