[tex-live] [XeTeX] Ftuture state of XeTeX in TeXLive

[Petr Tomasek]

On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 09:20:19AM -0300, George N. White III wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 7:42 AM, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 04:25:21PM +1100, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
> >> XeTeX font support is heaps better and  stable than what luaotfload package
> >> offers and I guess that is why many users still like using xetex instead
> >> luatex. I personally believe that it is a bad practice that luaotfload just
> >> copies ConTeXt code, it should not be deeply dependent on ConTeXt because Hans
> >> may want to try experimenting with some features today and next day he gets rid
> >> of them just like the recent updates of luaotfload that Khaled talked about it.
> >> I think, this is awful! What should users who used those features (and need it
> >> heavily in their daily typesetting tasks, do?). They wake up one day and
> >> suddenly see that yes, luaotfload does not provide the features they need.
> >> luaotfload needs to be written from scratch independent of any ConTeXt code.
> >
> > The situation is not as bad as you make it seems, what have gone is two
> > minor features that IMO was a mistake to provide them in the first
> > place, but since we are talking about a yet to be released version of
> > luaotfload, there might be an alternate solution at the time of release.
> >
> > Writing an OpenType layout engine is not a simple task, and you can
> > judge from the many years it toke FOSS community to have a really good
> > one, HarfBuzz (the name luaotfload is misleading, font loading is about
> > the easiest part of luaotfload, OpenType implementation is really what
> > matters.) If it were for me, I'd plug HarfBuzz into luatex proper and
> > call it a day, but this does not align well with the "design" principles
> > of luatex so it is unlikely to happen.
> 
> If plugging harfbuzz into luatex does not require a huge effort, it could
> serve as bridge from xetex to luatex while a more principled design
> is being created.

It would be better to have XeTeX with a stable HarfBuzz-ng support.

Actually, I think little people need more then than what XeTTeX acctually
provides...

-- 
Petr Tomasek <http://www.etf.cuni.cz/~tomasek>
Jabber: butrus at jabbim.cz

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