On 28/11/2006, at 0:35 , Frank Mittelbach wrote:



> why do you want to have an intermediate layer? basically to allow  

> for easy

> configuration changes and flexibility. it is the old story: unless  

> you build a

> common exchange layer modification is more than painful.



Good thinking, as always, Frank.

I guess my feeling about the whole thing is that fontspec  

incorporates the "user level" functionality of the NFSS fairly well.  

As long as people are using it properly (and I admit more should have  

been done to enforce this) in the first place then font definitions  

can be swapped out in the preamble, and intermediate commands  

\bfseries, \itshape are used in the document to ensure consistency.



It's a bit of a mix between your choices 1 and 2. Font features are  

specified through the consistent fontspec interface, (not that the  

OpenType feature interface isn't consistent of itself; just ugly) but  

font names must be used explicitly, and bold/italic fonts aren't  

always auto-detected.



For example,



\newfontfamily\secfont[

   Numbers = OldStyle,

   BoldFont = Hoefler Text Bold,

     ]{Hoefler Text}



The Numbers feature will work for any font that supports that  

feature, but it can never be completely automatic to set up an entire  

font family -- the user needs to know what the font names are, and  

what features it supports. This is true whether or not the interface  

is provided through an intermediate stage or directly.



Will