[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

[Simon Spiegel]

On 01.08.2012, at 15:10, Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at Rhul.Ac.Uk> wrote:

> 
> 
> Simon Spiegel wrote:
> 
>>> From: Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>
> 
>>> There was a problem with polyglossia because Fran?oise Charette
>>> left academia and no longer had time to maintain it. The current
>>> maintainer is Arthur Reutenauer. I hope that a few volunteers could
>>> help him. Microtypography is not just a matter of the microtype
>>> package, the internals must offer proper primitives. I do not know
>>> whether they are already available. It is not easy in some scripts,
>>> eg in Indic scripts due to glyph reordering.
>> 
>> Maybe it was a mistake to come up with examples, but this is exactly
>> the kind of answer I wasn't looking for. There is always a perfectly
>> valid reason why people stop working on a project or why something
>> doesn't get been developed. After all, we're mainly talking about
>> people doing this as an unpaid hobby. No one can't be blamed if he
>> decides that wants to spend his spare time in a different manner.
> 
> I am sorry, but I profoundly disagree.  It is /vital/ that people
> considering undertaking the work are aware of already known
> difficulties that they may/will encounter; to ask them to start
> work blindly, without a good state-of-the-art appraisal of
> difficulties already known or foreseen, is extremely unreasonable
> (IMHO, of course).  There is a time for debate, and a time
> for action, but except in situations involving life-and-death,
> intelligent and informed debate preceding action is almost always
> a good thing.

Let me put it this way: The reason why many of the shortcomings of TeX et al. haven't been dealt with yet, is certainly not because there wasn't enough discussion. And to be perfectly clear: I'm not saying that discussions prevent that things get done. And I certainly didn't suggest that someone should "start work blindly". I'm just saying that nothing will happen if there isn't someone who makes it happen and no discussion can get around this. And it might be a good idea to come up with ideas how we can find this someone.

Simon
--
Simon Spiegel
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