[XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance

Joseph Wright joseph.wright at morningstar2.co.uk
Sun Apr 26 13:08:43 CEST 2015


On 26/04/2015 12:00, Philip Taylor wrote:
> 
> 
> Joseph Wright wrote:
> 
>> The problem as always is not so much money as people.
> 
> Yes, I do appreciate that, but sometimes money is also an obstacle ("do
> I work on X, which will help keep a roof over my head, or on XeTeX,
> which may bring me fame but which may also result in my eviction ?").
> 
>> [Also, you do know about LuaTeX, yes? ;-)
> 
> Yes, of course, but I see it as an evolutionary dead-end, much as I
> would wish to see it otherwise.
> 
>> More seriously, XeTeX isn't a drop-in replacement for TeX90/pdfTeX.]
> 
> I have yet to find a legacy document which behaves differently (legacy
> Plain TeX, that is, not legacy LaTeX); if you can point me at one, I
> should be interested to experience the differences for myself.
> 
> ** Phil.

See for example details in
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/222286/what-are-the-incompatibilities-of-pdftex-xetex-and-luatex
for places where there are edge cases. The most obvious would be that
XeTeX requires the xdvipdfmx back-end (so differences at the \special
level), but a simple piece of code

    \def\"{0}\expandafter\def\csname^^^^^00022\endcsname{1}
    \ifnum\"=0 \message{tex82}\else\message{newstuff}\fi

(ConTeXt wiki) gives different results with TeX90 and XeTeX due to
different treatment of more than two ^^ (catcode 7) in a row.
--
Joseph Wright



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