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

[Paul Isambert]

Le 30/10/2011 06:25, Vafa Khalighi a écrit :
>  XeTeX font support is heaps better and stable than what luaotfload
>  package offers and I guess that is why many users still like using
>  xetex instead luatex. I personally believe that it is a bad practice
>  that luaotfload just copies ConTeXt code, it should not be deeply
>  dependent on ConTeXt because Hans may want to try experimenting with
>  some features today and next day he gets rid of them just like the
>  recent updates of luaotfload that Khaled talked about it. I think,
>  this is awful! What should users who used those features (and need it
>  heavily in their daily typesetting tasks, do?). They wake up one day
>  and suddenly see that yes, luaotfload does not provide the features
>  they need. luaotfload needs to be written from scratch independent of
>  any ConTeXt code.

An independent fontloader could very well be unstable too. But anyway I
suppose this will happen some day; relying on Hans's code is the only
solution for the moment, because nobody has written a public alternative
(and writing such an alternative is no simple task), but I don't suppose
it will remain so.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't use luaotfload but my own fontloader.
It is not public for the moment because it doesn't do much more than
what I need to do. But I have good hope that somebody will some day come
with a full solution; or perhaps different people will write partial
solutions (someone could write something for latin typography, somebody
else could devise an arabic fontloader, and so on and so forth). The
problem is, it's easier to blame luaotfload for its uncertain status
than to sit down and write a replacement; so please let's not forget
that without luaotfload LuaTeX wouldn't be different from PDFTeX as far
as fonts are concerned.

Best,
Paul

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/xetex/attachments/20111030/0be73aa3/attachment-0001.html>