[XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

OK, how about the following table of contents for a xelatex companion:

- all material is based on the use of xelatex in combination with freely available high quality fonts, such as Latin Modern and TeX Gyre. The added finesses of Zapfino accessible through xelatex are beyond our scope (to give an example)
- All material focuses on the use of the memoir class, because it seems that most of the material in the latex companion is supported by memoir
- Other classes to be at least mentioned are book and article (koma-script?)

Part 1: basic use
1. Introduction, history of tex & friends, where to get help
2. Structure of a latex document, sectioning
3. Basic formatting tools and page layout
4. Character coding, unicode, OTF fonts, xelatex
5. Internationalization through polyglossia (*)
6. Typesetting of mathematics (mathspec etc included) (**)
7. Floats (also: new float specification through memoir)
8. Tabular material
9. Graphics: inclusion of external figures, PFG/TikZ
10. Utilities : bibtex and makeindex (***)
11. Utilities for scientific works: mhchem, SIunits, natbib, ...
12. Beamer

Part 2: programming packages
- Material to be added (I am not an expert in this)

Part 3: xetex specific commands reference manual

(*) In developing a polyglossia gloss file for Japanese, I found out that for instance chapter headings etc need to be redefined. This is a nuisance, because the layout differs from class to class. Very unfortunate but I don't see an easy solution that covers all cases

(**) I realize now that I wonder how well all the mathematical symbols are represented in OTF fonts. I suppose one still has to resort to old-fashioned "combined characters" to cover all possibilities.

(***) as for references, how far should one go in the coverage of for instance jura-bib, the various bst files, etc. In how far is bibtex usable in xetex? I have used Japanese characters in UTF-8 in bibtex, but I don't know if they were sorted correctly, for instance.



--- On Thu, 9/9/10, Elliott Roper <elliott at yrl.co.uk> wrote:

> From: Elliott Roper <elliott at yrl.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"
> To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
> Date: Thursday, 9 September, 2010, 7:04 PM
> Wilfred, You are so right!
> I am just such an intimidated casual beginner. I find
> myself experimenting in silly directions when my Google-fu
> fails me. Simple questions like "Does Context play nicely
> with XeTeX" turns into "Should I learn memoir instead or as
> well"
> 
> I would so welcome the Xe(mumble) companion that I'll
> volunteer as a test monkey in a blink of an eye. I'll start
> right now by keeping notes of all the dead-ends I go down.
> 
> Elliott
> 
> 
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