[XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative"

[Elliott Roper]

Wilfred and Michiel,
Your ToCs are music to my ears.

Yet, from the point of view of this intimidated casual beginner something more is needed. To get started, I'm simultaneously learning aquamacs, emacs, lisp, bash snippets and auctex while trying to discover the connections between TeX and XeTeX, LaTeX and XeLaTeX and then finding out which features of fontspec, context, memoir and all their cousins and uncles and aunts break which features of the others. F'rinstance, I have set aside for the moment, after advice here, the problem of escaping spaces and other special characters in file and path names while using the various packages. It seems every one of them is subtly different. XeTex and fontspec have polished up the faded elegance of TeX with unicode and painless outline font support, yet I'm still battling through a thicket of competing packages, trying to discover their dependencies at the same time as trying to discover how each can be useful to me.

I'm not complaining -- that might come later <g>. I spent the rest of yesterday reading the memoir class manual with a mixture of delight and awe. I think I'll use memoir to compile a narrative of my journey through the thicket. I hope I'll get far enough along to produce something useful to others blundering about like me. I'm retired from work now, so I have plenty of time to help where I can. This looks like better fun than gardening.

On 10 Sep 2010, at 00:32, Wilfred van Rooijen wrote:

> Hi Elliott,
> 
<snip> ...and thanks.
> 
> Your encouragement is good. I may even start considering making a tentative table of contents for the newly revamped xetex companion - see what comments it will attract.
> 
> Cheerio,
> Wilfred