[XeTeX] compatibility of XeTeX with movie15.sty

[Jonathan Kew]

On 20 Oct 2005, at 10:34 am, Alexandros D. Gotsis wrote:

> Dear Jonathan et al.
>
> I was trying to use movie15.sty with XeTeX to include quicktime  
> movies in the slides for my lectures (in greek) and I could not get  
> it work. It seems that movie15 needs hyperref (and graphicx) in  
> this case, but, even then, it does not add the movie to the pdf  
> file. Movie15 works well with LaTeX  (with or without hyperref) in  
> my system. Is anything known on this?

Sorry, there's no chance of this working in this way at present. I  
haven't looked at movie15.sty, but it must be using either (1) pdfTeX  
extensions or (2) driver-specific \special commands for something  
like dvipdfmx in order to include the movies. And neither of these  
mechanisms will work with XeTeX: (1) the pdfTeX extensions are not  
present, as XeTeX is based on e-TeX and not on pdfTeX; (2) the  
xdv2pdf driver can't embed movies because the Quartz graphics APIs  
that it uses to generate PDF don't support this.

I can think of a possible workaround, if you really want to combine  
XeTeX-generated text with movies: create PDF files with the movies  
embedded, using pdfTeX, and then place these into the XeTeX document.  
I have not tried this, but it's possible that embedding PDFs like  
this may preserve all the features of the embedded document,  
including its movie.

If this doesn't work (I don't know if movies will survive the Quartz- 
based PDF-inclusion process), then you could also try inverting the  
process: generate the text for your slides in PDF form using XeTeX,  
and then use pdfTeX to assemble the final slides, combining the text  
from XeTeX (is this what the pdfpages package lets you do?) with the  
movies you want to add.

Not a simple and automatic solution, I'm afraid, and perhaps more  
effort than you want to spend.

In the longer term, the real answer is a new XeTeX-to-PDF driver  
based on a more full-featured PDF-generating engine.

Jonathan
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