Fonts Help

[Suresh Govindachar]

On 8/7/2020 8:13 AM, Philip Taylor wrote:
> Peter Flynn wrote:
>>
>> On 07/08/2020 10:30, Tianyi Chen wrote:
...
>>>
>>> Recently, I was trying to learn TeX and reading "The TeXbook”. I am 
>>> confused reading chapter4 "Fonts of Type”, the author did a really 
>>> good job teaching switching one font from another, but when I was 
>>> trying to explore more fonts, there are two problems  cannot be 
>>> solved by myself.
>>
...
> 
> TeX :  basic, restricted to "designed for, or converted for use with, 
> TeX"  fonts.
...
> XeTeX :  does everything /I/ need, and can use any font I want it to.
...
> 
> /Philip Taylor/

My understanding is that to use a font -- not just for a few characters 
but for large portions of a document -- one really needs to use a "font 
family" -- i.e., specify all the faces of fonts and all the numbers and 
tolerances for the sizes of fonts and of spacing that can occur in 
contexts such as superscript, math mode etc. Examples for plain TeX can 
be seen in the book and also in 
http://tug.ctan.org/info/tex-primer_vms-specific/fontsize.tex and entry 
for \tenpoint in Seroul and Levy's "A Beginner's Book of TeX".

Does XeTeX make it easy to select entire fonts-families or to select 
only fonts leaving it up to the type-setter to define files similar to 
fontsize.tex linked above?

--Suresh