[XeTeX] [tex-live] Future state of XeTeX in TeXLive

William Adams will.adams at frycomm.com
Fri Oct 28 19:44:29 CEST 2011


On Oct 28, 2011, at 12:54 PM, George N. White III wrote:

> 0.  Why is Tex still necessary?   My impression is that Knuth hoped to
> see his work used in more creative ways than TeX distros.

Well, that's why LuaTeX is being developed, and the thought behind the development of ANT (though I haven't had much luck getting more recent versions of the latter compiled).

> 1.  Knuth wanted to create beautiful books, yet many distinctly
> unbeautiful books are still being published.   Lack of support for
> font design size, too similar fonts used for text and maths (e.g.,
> same glyph for letter "a" and variable "a") contribute to lack of
> beauty.   I'm reminded of Knuth's early paper in which he analyzed
> bugs in discarded decks of punched cards and found many examples of
> errors resulting from failure to apply well-known principles taught in
> into courses.

Sturgeon's law.

> 2.  Knuth created his own fonts and tools and these are still part of
> a TeX system.   What problems are still present in the fonts and
> support provided by modern GUI environments?

I'd really like to see a super-font-family developed which encompasses _every_ possible axis and design option in NFSS.

In GUI environments, selecting optical sizes is a pain, as is selecting character variations.

> 3.  Knuth was concerned with maths.   There are now many groups that
> use TeX for documents that do not involved maths.  What do the
> descendants of TeX have that other general purpose tools lack?

Free licensing and easy operation from a simple text file and efficiency.

> 4.  Knuth was concerned primarily with typeset material.   Since then
> there have been developments in linearization/flattened maths for
> communications, and math markup for web (html) documents.

It would be neat to see a TeX variant which would make a .ePub, adding special characters (such as zero-width-non-joiners and discretionary hyphens) to improve rendering.

> 5.   Knuth built a compiler that is used in batch mode, but the
> majority of documents are created using GUI tools.   What use cases
> are better served by batch mode, and in what cases is TeX used by
> default because of available GUI tools refuse to play.

Large database publications. Variable data printing.

William


-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.




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