🚀 go-pugleaf

There doesn't seem to be a more appropriate Adobe formum than this one to post this question, but if there is, please advise me.

I am looking for a Times font (Times Roman, Times New Roman, or other variant) that contains at least the Latin 1 characters plus the oe ligature and, most importantly, the thin space and the figure space; the en space is also desirable.

This is what I am trying to achieve, using the Antenna House v.3 XSL-FO formatting engine:

(a) print a non-breaking space that does not expand on justification (the figure space (U+2007) will do, but the en space (U+2002) surrounded by word joiner characters (U+2060) would be acceptable, and preferable in some circumstances;

(b) print a thin space (U+2009) that does not break on line endings -- the only way to do this seems to be by surrounding a thin space with word joiner characters.

This methodology seems to work in Antenna House v.3 *as long as you don't change the font in the process*. That is, we have tried this with MS Arial Unicode, and it seems to work. However, when we use MS Times New Roman for the text and switch to MS Arial Unicode for the glyphs for the figure space and the thin space (neither of which are in MS TNR), then it no longer works. Admittedly, this would appear to be a problem with the Antenna House interpretation of what we are doing, but it would be simpler anyway to just use a Times font that contains the required characters.

To give some concrete contexts, the figure space is needed for metric / European format numbers (25 365 rather than 25,365) and currency symbols (4 250 $ rather than $4,250), and the thin space is needed inside � French quotes �, on either side of an em dash � yes, that's how we want it � and before a colon at the end of a paragraph in French, like this :
(new para)

On a more general note, I (who am not a typographer) find it both odd and disappointing (actually, appalling) that virtually all modern fonts do not contain the very basic spacing and spacing control characters that are part of the Unicode General Punctuation characters. It seems to me that these are fundamental to any good-quality print products, and it baffles me why they are missing, as in MS TNR. About all that seems to exist in most fonts is the regular space and the no-break space, but since both of these spaces expand on justification (according to the Unicode standard and to typographers I have consulted), they are useless for what we want to accomplish.

Unicode has been around now for quite a long time, and yet the font support that is needed to make it practical to use seems to be sadly lacking. Pity.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Ed Hicks
ed.hicks@justice.gc.ca