Hi,

for a style-file that gives access to the alchemist symbols in UTF-8
under XeLaTeX I do:

\providecommand\AlchemistSalt{\fontspec{Symbola}\symbol{"1F714}} % NaCl
\providecommand\AlchemistNitre{\fontspec{Symbola}\symbol{"1F715}} % KNO3
....

Is it possible to define the font used only once, so that it would be
easier to switch to other suitable fonts (Quivira, EB-Garamond) if
desired?

Thanks in advance

Engelbert

Am Sun, 5 Mar 2023 12:02:56 +0100 schrieb Dr Engelbert Buxbaum:

> Hi,
>
> for a style-file that gives access to the alchemist symbols in UTF-8
> under XeLaTeX I do:

Nitpicking: the symbols are in Unicode. UTF-8 is only an encoding
(there are others, e.g. UTF-16). And with "1F714 you are not using
something special to UTF-8, that would even work if you encode your
file in latin1, you are accessing the unicode code point.

>
> \providecommand\AlchemistSalt{\fontspec{Symbola}\symbol{"1F714}} % NaCl
> \providecommand\AlchemistNitre{\fontspec{Symbola}\symbol{"1F715}} % KNO3
> ...
>
> Is it possible to define the font used only once, so that it would be
> easier to switch to other suitable fonts (Quivira, EB-Garamond) if
> desired?

See \newfontface and \newfontfamily in the fontspec documentation.
(And your definition is missing braces and so will switch the font
also for the following text.)

--
Ulrike Fischer
http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/

In article <fb0v22eth4xt.dlg@nililand.de>, news3@nililand.de says...
>
> See \newfontface and \newfontfamily in the fontspec documentation.

I ended up with

\providefontfamily\Alchemist{Symbola}

\providecommand{\AlchemistSalt}{\Alchemist \symbol{"1F714}}
\providecommand{\AlchemistNitre}{\Alchemist \symbol{"1F715}}

> (And your definition is missing braces and so will switch the font
> also for the following text.)

So that is where all the error messages came from ;-)