[XeTeX] Re: [MacTeX] Re: A Zapfish request (was Re: [] XeTeX)

[William F. Adams]

On Wednesday, April 14, 2004, at 04:40  PM, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> If it were me, I'd probably write a little filter in Perl or 
> something, and run that as a preprocessor before typesetting with 
> xetex. :-) Of course, that doesn't integrate well with whatever your 
> TeX macros may be doing by way of font selection, etc.

I seem to recall something along those lines having been recently 
announced on comp.text.tex --- I may've misunderstood it though.

My usage of OTPs is probably simplistic enough that such an approach 
would work --- the problem is my programming skills are rudimentary at 
best. TeX sort of clicks with me (like Lisp did in college), but 
anything beyond simplistic Pascal tends toward baffling for me.

>> Apple's license forbids modification or even decompiling / 
>> reverse-engineering so as to learn enough to implement in a fashion 
>> other than provided for by their APIs. That was one of the reasons 
>> for my Byzantine technique to make use of Zapfino using Omega.
>
> Well, that doesn't much surprise me. And I suppose if you buy Zapfino 
> from Linotype, there's probably a restrictive license, too.

Probably. I've not looked into it though, and at least Linotype made 
available .afm files for their Type 1 version --- that gave me a 
running start on my version.

I'd imagine Linotype's license would be like Adobe's and allow 
conversion for private use, but I've not looked into that. No huhu 
either way though.

> There are, of course, APIs that can directly render any individual 
> glyph; would you be interested in a \glyph primitive in xetex, to 
> request any specific glyph (by ID) from the current font?

Yes!

> No offence! Your comments are welcome. In responding, I only meant to 
> try and clarify some of the goals (and non-goals) that I've been 
> aiming for with XeTeX, and what does or doesn't fit in with likely 
> future directions.

It's so nice to be able to communicate w/o unintended emotional 
entanglements ;)

> One key criterion in determining what gets into xetex, so far, has 
> been what I need for the typesetting projects I do; it's a been a 
> one-person, very-part-time project, a tool for my own use. (And I 
> don't do math typesetting, so be glad any of that works at all!) If I 
> can get it to a state where a larger team can be involved, perhaps 
> some more interesting progress can be made.

Sounds great! I'm looking forward to helping out more concretely as 
things work out.

Thanks!

William

> -- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com

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