http://typography.com/ask/recentTopic.php?rtID=86

H&FJ have a handy chart if you scroll down. As you can see, Adobe CS and Quark are pretty much it, at least for advanced features. If your friend wanted to use Word, they could cheat by going to insert>character, and finding each SC or whatever glyph they wanted, and inserting them one by one. Unless their poetry is Icelandic saga length, this might be a usable workaround.

Not Open Source but you could hand edit XAML - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms745109.aspx

Might just have to do it old-school, with a separate SC&osf font.

Actually, it’s easier to access small caps that way than via the OpenType menus in Quark and InDesign, so your friend with Word should be just fine.

I don’t have any idea how OpenOffice.org deals with OpenType, but I suppose we could lobby their development community to make full support a priority. Might as well poke at the Scribus, GIMP, and Inkscape folks as well.

XeTeX.

XeTeX with fontspec: fontspec is a pretty powerful package (designed to work with XeTeX) which provides an easy-to-use interface to a good range of OpenType features. For an idea of what it will do, look here for the fontspec files and download the pdf user documentation.

Perhaps I didn’t catch it, but it would be nice if there was a graphical interface for XeTeX.

Mikey :-)

wikipedia has a bit info on this, but doesn’t seem to mention much in the open source world except the already mentioned XeTex:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType#Advanced_typography

Interestingly, Expression Design supposedly supports it. Not open source, but I’ve been looking for a replacement for Freehand, and I might have to (reluctantly) give that MS product a try.

Scribus is an open source page layout app like Xpress and InDesign. There’s a bit of info on this page:

http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&sm=crossplatform&page=machints...

specifically:

“In addition, Scribus supports OpenType Fonts, but not in the DFONT format that MacOSX uses. You can use fondu, a tool to convert fonts with resource forks, into a format which can be understood by X11. You are recommended to convert OpenType fonts into TrueType/ OpenType fonts, to preserve all the glyphs. (Type 1 fonts are limited to 256 gylphs per font.)”

I’m not knowledgeable enough on OpenType to translate that.

It’s one thing for a program to access and display OpenType fonts, quite another for it to provide full OpenType feature support.

SuperUltraFabulous: depends what you mean by GUI. If you mean a WYSIWYG editor, no, there isn’t, by LyX comes close (I don’t know whether it likes XeTeX though). If you are happy to type markup, but want TeX compilation and preview integrated into your editor, then you should take a look at TeXnicCenter, Texmaker and MiKTeX. I cannot recommend any of these, since I’ve never used any of them, but they might be what you’re after.

I’m happy to do TeX the old-fashioned way, myself: vim and the commandline.

LyX is reputed to work with XeTeX. There’s some limited information about this on the LyX wiki here. I can’t offer any personal experience of this though; I have used LyX in the past, and use XeTeX currently, but have never tried the two together (like mr, I found it easier in the end to process my TeX files with a text editor).

I’ve a feeling that most of the TeX-oriented IDEs like TeXnicCenter and TeXmaker won’t currently work with XeTeX as they don’t support saving their source files in UTF-8, which I believe XeTeX requires.

Thanks for all the help everyone.

I’m going to try and make a separate font of the text figures.

I know Scribus has some degree of opentype support, but not sure how much...
http://www.scribus.net/

I haven’t used it for a few months, but if I recall correctly from when I downloaded Scribus, the level of support is that you can get at all the OT-feature characters via a sort of glyph palette, but it DOESN’T have the ability to apply all the lookups like ligatures and small caps and so on as selectable stylistic options. Sadly. Unless they’ve put out a new release since I last looked, that does. Ahem.

______________________________________________
Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster’s stopped working.

“I haven’t used it for a few months, but if I recall correctly from when I downloaded Scribus, the level of support is that you can get at all the OT-feature characters via a sort of glyph palette, but it DOESN’T have the ability to apply all the lookups like ligatures and small caps and so on as selectable stylistic options. Sadly. Unless they’ve put out a new release since I last looked, that does. Ahem.”

Yeah I was disappointed that they didn’t support sc or ligatures. I have a feeling they will in the future. But until then sad face

“Perhaps I didn’t catch it, but it would be nice if there was a graphical interface for XeTeX.”

There is: TeXWorks :-)

Doesn’t Mellel have OpenType support?

[ Edit: Oops. It isn’t free. Sorry. ]

“I’ve a feeling that most of the TeX-oriented IDEs like TeXnicCenter and TeXmaker won’t currently work with XeTeX as they don’t support saving their source files in UTF-8, which I believe XeTeX requires.”

TeXMaker allows UTF8 saving, and works perfectly fine with XeTeX (it’s what I use it for), so I’d say use TexMaker in combination with XeTeX’s ability to use any system font you have available. Just make sure to change the quick build command to using “xelatex” instead of “latex”, and to set default editor font encoding to “utf8” and you’re pretty much good to go.

You can find a utility to extract a small caps font here:
http://www.nbcs.rutgers.edu/~hedrick/typography/

XeTeX is nice, but PdfLaTeX works with Microtype. Use this script to convert OpenType fonts with LaTeX (or even better, LyX):

http://umrg.uwaterloo.ca/cpoile/LaTeX