[XeTeX] Porting XeTeX

Jjgod Jiang gzjjgod at gmail.com
Fri Mar 14 06:37:38 CET 2008


Hi,

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008, Joel C. Salomon wrote:
> A question for Jonathan et al.:  What is required of an operating
> system to port XeTeX to it successfully?  A C compiler?  C++?
> OS-level support for OpenType?  Is porting freetype sufficient?  A
> different library?

XeTeX and related utilities depends on the following libraries:

ICU, FreeType 2, fontconfig

and it's build system relies on GNU autoconf generated shell scripts.
So you may want to verify if all of them works on Plan 9.

> I'm asking mainly because of Plan 9, a UNIX-like OS with a C compiler
> (but no C++) to which the freetype library has been ported.  There's
> an old port of TeX that doesn't work too well anymore, so there's been
> some talk about porting a modern TeX.  (LuaTeX requires C++ for the
> PDF library it uses, so that's out for now.)

Well, it reminds me that XeTeX now seems use xpdf for image file input
too, just like LuaTeX. Not sure if there a workaround for this
requirement yet.

- Jiang


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