[xep-support] Mixing Chinese and English fonts

[Bob Stayton]

I have XML documents that are primarily Chinese but with occasional English
words or phrases. The current font we use to render these documents contains
both Chinese and Latin letters, but the Latin letters are of poor quality.
We would like to substitute a better font for the English characters.

I understand that with XSL-FO 1.0 you can provide a comma-separated list of
font names in the font-family property.  However, one cannot designate
specific characters or ranges to be rendered in the secondary fonts.  In
other words, if a character is found in the primary font, that font will be
used.

I would like to avoid having to put all the English words within fo:inlines
to switch fonts. So we are considering using something like Fontographer to
edit the (open source) Chinese font to remove the Latin characters.  I
believe this will then force XEP to switch to the secondary font-family when
a Latin character is encountered in the input.  Is this a sound strategy?
Has anyone attempted this?

Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
DocBook Consulting
bobs at sagehill.net



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