[XeTeX] OT?: Interesting? post about LuaTeX on usenet:comp.text.tex

[Jonathan Kew]

On 10 Aug 2006, at 4:36 pm, Musa Furber wrote:

>
> On Aug 10, 2006, at 3:57 PM, William Adams wrote:
>
>> My apologies to those who get this twice for the wasted bandwidth.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> There's a note about XeTeX at the end of it.
>
> Does LuaTeX today run on more than XeTeX's three platforms well
> enough to be used for production work?

Re XeTeX's "three platforms".... it depends how you count. I'm aware  
of it running on:

   Mac OS X - PPC
   Mac OS X - Intel
   Windows XP (wonder if it runs on Windows 2000?)
   Linux x86
   Linux PPC
   Linux AMD64
   Solaris/SPARC

...and it probably runs on various other Unix-y things as well. (What  
else does LuaTeX run on? I guess there are still people running OS/2  
or BeOS or Amiga...)

But in another sense, there are only two (not three) "platforms"  
currently targeted by XeTeX: one that uses Apple Type Services to  
access fonts, and one that uses Fontconfig. The former version runs  
on both OS X architectures, and the latter runs on pretty much any  
Unix-like system with the Fontconfig library, and also on Windows  
(because Fontconfig has been ported there). It's just a simple  
recompile for the various different CPU types and runtime libraries,  
because I've tried to keep the code fairly portable.

Oh, and XeTeX uses the same OpenType layout code (from ICU) on all  
platforms. The main platform-dependence is that the OS X version  
alone has the *additional* capability of using ATSUI and AAT fonts,  
but if you choose to use the same OpenType fonts on all platforms,  
then the same layout library (built into XeTeX, not dependent on the  
host OS) will be used in all cases.

JK