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<p>Hi,</p>
<p>I would like to ask about the prospects/plans/status of XeTeX for
platforms other than MacOS X.</p>
<p>I read carefully the <small>paper on XeTeX for IUC27, and I seems
to me that MacOS specific code is used in only 3 places in XeTeX:<br>
1. In handling ATSUI fonts and words typeset in these fonts,<br>
2. XeTeX calls the ATSUI bidirectional algorithm.<br>
3. XeTeX uses a MacOS-specific API to render the document into a PDF
file</small></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">I think that item (1) can simply be
dropped from non-MacOS builds, and item (2) can probably be replaced by
either ICU (I think it includes a version of the algorithm) or
freebidi, a GPL library implementing the algorithm. <br>
</span><span style="font-size: 16px;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">Item (3) is probably the most
difficult to replace, mostly because of the need to subset and download
OpenType fonts (both TTF and OTF) in the PDF file. Up to this issue,
the PDF generation can probably use the pdfTeX generator.<br>
</span><span style="font-size: 16px;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">I am not suggesting that any of this
is easy. Even just building the code with all the MacOS-specific
#ifdef'ed away might be difficult.<br>
</span><span style="font-size: 16px;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">But I would like to see this happen
(I think many other users would too), and I would be happy to help. I
have experience in adding font-downloading support to free software (I
added TTF/PFB font downloading and subsetting to Qt, I added OTF
downloading to iText, and students working under my supervision added
OTF subsetting to iText; Qt is C++ code and iText is Java).<br>
</span><span style="font-size: 16px;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">I would like to suggest that a good
way to move this forward is to separate the system issues from the
coding issues. That is, the first step should be to create a
platform-independent source tree that builds the functional program on
MacOS but a crippled version without the MacOS code on other platforms.
Then the missing parts should be defined, either in terms of an API, or
just in terms of writing replacement to the delete-MacOS code. Then
people with specific expertise can try to help by writing the missing
code. <br>
</span><span style="font-size: 16px;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">Regards, Sivan Toledo, Tel-Aviv
University</span></p>
<p><br>
<span style="font-size: 16px;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"></span></p>
<p><br>
</p>
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