Good evening, A few months ago I migrated my Org-Mode configuration from PDFLaTeX to XeTeX. It is great using "real fonts" and Unicode symbols, and my Org-Mode configuration only needed a few changes to use XeTeX. Although I didn't read any documentation on XeTeX, I know enough about LaTeX to stay out of trouble. When I got around to choosing my primary fonts though I got a taste of my lack of Unicode knowledge.
The fontspec let's you set up the three main fonts like this \setmainfont{DejaVu Serif} \setsansfont{DejaVu Sans}[Scale=MatchLowercase] \setmonofont{DejaVu Sans Mono}[Scale=MatchLowercase] And I figured those would cover at least the emoticon Unicode block. Nope! Empty boxes appear the first time I want to use a 😈. Sheesh. Never knew how much work font authors face to cover the code blocks. Now I do. Anyway I am left scratching my head how to use emoticons in my documents without changing my three font configurations. And I'm not the only one. The ucharclass https://github.com/Pomax/ucharclasses packages exists to solve this topic. It detects the Unicode block for the characters and changes the font in place. However #1 I couldn't get it working and #2 the package has no maintainer. After looking at it I don't think I can do it so I looked for another way to handle this. This post https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/25249/how-do-i-use-a-particular-font-for-a-small-section-of-text-in-my-document explains how to change the font for a particular region. It works great. I tested it out for my use cases and it works fine. Here is an example file: \documentclass[]{article} \usepackage{fontspec} \newfontfamily\xxtx{Symbola} \begin{document} The domino doesn't exist in my default font. {\xxtx But it does in here: 🁝.} \end{document} The ability to use Unicode in Org-Mode and seamlessly export it to PDF via XeTeX is so nice. And it looks pretty easy to handle different fontx in the code. So I figured I could write an exporter that extends ox-latex exporter to do this for me. The exporter would be basic: it would look at every single character, figure out if it is in a "special to me" block, and if it is use a different font. My plan is that simple. Questions for you: - What do you think of this? - What would you do here? - Would you use it? My use case is pretty simple, being able to use emoticons and APL characters and stuff. And I can't be the only one that would use it. I'm reaching out here though because I'm pretty out of touch in regards to other Org-Mode XeTeX users. Regards, Grant