[XeTeX] Version 0.87 released

Jonathan Kew jonathan_kew at sil.org
Wed Sep 22 23:06:07 CEST 2004


On 22 Sep 2004, at 9:44 pm, Adam Lindsay wrote:

> If you're not getting flak from one side, it's the other. Now I'm going
> to ask you to explain your changes in non-LaTeX-centric language...
>
> Jonathan Kew said this at Wed, 22 Sep 2004 20:46:39 +0100:
>
>>  - support for generating bookmarks and links in PDF files, e.g. using
>> the LaTeX hyperref package (specify the dvipdfm option to hyperref to
>> make this work)
>
> (I'm extrapolating/guessing from the latex & context drivers here:)
> Is this driven by \special{pdf: RAW_PDF_CODE} then?

Not quite: I don't have a way to embed arbitrary PDF code.

What happens is that the xdv2pdf driver writes an auxiliary file called 
"<jobname>.pdf.marks" containing a record of the location and text of 
all \specials that begin "pdf:", and then runs a post-processing script 
called xdv2pdf_mergemarks (it's Perl, you can go read it!) that 
interprets certain ones of these and inserts the appropriate links, 
etc., into the PDF. Currently, the script only processes "bann", 
"eann", "dest", and "outline", plus an extra code "ABOX" that the 
driver generates for each chunk of text generated between "bann" and 
"eann". Other PDF specials will be ignored.

But there are limits to what can be done this way, as you don't get a 
chance to actually insert things *into* the PDF stream as it's 
generated, only to patch things onto it afterwards.

>>  - support for dvipdfm-style "color" \specials as an alternative to
>> XeTeX's "x:textcolor" and "x:rulecolor"
> \special{color gray .15}
> \special{color rgb .20 0 1}
> \special{color cmyk 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8}
> ?

Yes, those should all work. So should "color push", "color pop", and a 
bunch of named colors, following the example of dvipdfm. (I know, I 
know, you want full documentation. Some day....)

> I guess I do work best from examples...

An example will be forthcoming.... :-)

JK



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