[XeTeX] paper available

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 11 avr. 05, à 10:27, Jonathan Kew a écrit :

> FYI - in case anyone wants to have a look - I've posted a copy of the 
> paper "The Multilingual Lion: TeX learns to speak Unicode", written 
> for last week's Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC27, 
> Berlin), on the Downloads section of the XeTeX site at 
> http://scripts.sil.org/xetex. The slides I used for the talk are 
> available, as well as the printed version of the paper for the 
> conference proceedings.

Very nice and informative! So that was the deadline you mentioned a few 
days ago! It explains very clearly the issues involved in adapting TeX 
to smart fonts and modern OSes, the differences between standard (e)TeX 
and XeTeX, and the relation to Unicode, AAT and OpenType. Especially 
the slide version, for example by pointing out the difference between 
XeTeX's thinking in terms of words and TeX's thinking in terms of 
glyphs. In any case I learnt a lot from looking at it, and it's very 
interesting and instructive to read about TeX and fonts when viewed 
from another perspective than the TeX community.

> This is a paper about the creation of XeTeX, aimed at a Unicode 
> technical audience, rather than a TeX audience, so it's probably of 
> limited interest to many users. I expect to be giving a presentation 
> designed for a TeX audience at the TUG2005 conference (anyone coming 
> to Wuhan?), but I'm afraid that one's not written yet!

IMHO it would be already quite appropriate in its present state for 
publication in TUGboat. I've already seen papers speaking less of TeX 
than this one.

Bruno Voisin