[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Tue, 7 Aug 2012 00:06:23 -0700 schrieb Apostolos Syropoulos:


> Using TFMs and related technologies seems to me quite outdated.

No, it is not outdated. It is a very useful technology when you want
to handle special symbols or fonts. E.g. chess uses a lot of symbols
which have no unicode positions (e.g. masks to produce some color
effects) and so chess fonts have no standard encodings. The legacy
font system of tex makes it possible to use them without having to
wory about the correct input. 

But this are *special* cases. For normal text fonts I agree with
you: 

> Personally, I want to be able to use any font my system includes
> without having to do fancy transformations. 

It should be possible to use "normal fonts" without much fuss.


-- 
Ulrike Fischer 
http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/