[XeTeX] Compatibility issues with ednotes and pstricks or TikZ

[Keith J. Schultz]

Hi Nathan, Vafa,

	TeX, LaTeX, Xe(La)TeX, Lua(La)Tex, etc come with a very steep learning curve.
	It was one of the reasons I stopped using LaTeX some 20 years ago. 
	
	Also, back then the packages were not stable and conflicted with each other so if 
	really needed something you had better do it yourself.

	THAT was THEN. Today, a lot has changed and become very stable and usable.
	Evenmore so, with the support of unicode. 

	The problem is that there is NO MODERN Reference for LaTeX, Xe(La)TeX or Lua(La)TeX
	that is usable for finding packages for the simple user of TeX et.al. Even the all so famous
	LaTeX Companion is helplessly outdated. Believe, me! I had bought the latest available version of the
	Book. If I had not started delving into TeXLive via the show info  panel of the TeXLive utility,
	I would have given up on TeX, again.

	You have to avoid older packages as much as possible. Look for newer packages. 
	Look carefully, at Koma Scripts and  Memoir, you can probably get more functionality by
	adapting from them. 

	For Graphics, avoid ps-tricks, use some newer. TikZ and pgf are quite able and simple enough to learn
	and more packages are coming out that use them.

	 Vafa, have you tried asking the authors of the packages that you support(work around their short commings)
	to support, bidi or RTL. They are most likely not aware of the problems, because the designed their package
	only of LTR. Maybe you, can gather a group around you that will modify and update the other packages.
	KEEP UP THE SUPERB WORK. 

	Sorry, I this is somewhat OT, to others.

	regards
		Keith.

Am 23.09.2011 um 07:54 schrieb Nathan Sidoli:

> Yes, of course you are right. However, many of the older LaTeX packages are not being developed very actively any more (or not at all in some cases) so it makes it difficult to decide what to use when one need the functionality of some of the older packages but also wants to work with unicode, etc.
> 
> Anyway, you have certainly done a great deal to make bidi very functional and I am very grateful for that.
> 
> 
> On 11/09/23 12:09, VAFA KHALIGHI wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> For how long have bidi and ednotes been incompatible? François Charette , who maintains arabxetex and works on polyglossia, wrote an example file showing how to use arabxetex + bidi with ednotes to produce critical editions, so I assumed there would be some effort to keep the packages compatible. 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Well, certainly bidi can not support every single package on CTAN, one would need unlimited resources to be able to do that. bidi itself is now too big, it supports around 100 packages. Unfortunately the concept is misunderstood, it is not the duty of bidi package to add support for other packages but other packages themselves have to add bidi support. bidi should only support standard LaTeX and considering this, I have done heaps more than I ought to do. So it makes sense if you contact the author of ednotes package and ask him for bidi support in his package. 

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