[dvipdfmx] xdvipdfmx/xdv2pdf "x:" specials

[Joseph Wright]

On 02/09/2020 11:36, Jonathan Kew wrote:
> On 02/09/2020 10:57, Joseph Wright wrote:
>> Hello Jonathan (cc dvipdfmx list),
>>
>> There was a question on TeX-sx yesterday about the "x:" specials used 
>> by XeTeX/xdvipdfmx 
>> (https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/560959/xelatex-graphics-specials). 
>> I've tried to answer there, tracking stuff through, as today they are 
>> also available in dvipdfmx. However, I wonder if they are or were ever 
>> formally documented. I *think* you introduced them in xdv2pdf, but the 
>> source repo for XeTeX/xdv2pdf only goes back to around 2006, and they 
>> were already present.
>>
>> Is there anything you can point to about them?
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Joseph
> 
> Oh my, that's some ancient history!
> 
> There's at least a little bit of info, I believe, in the old "XeTeX 
> Notes" file that represented the first "documentation" intended for 
> anyone besides the initial author and target user of the system :) ... 
> there seems to be a copy at 
> http://www.tug.org/texmf-dist/doc/xetex/base/XeTeX-notes.pdf.
> 
> I'm afraid I don't have anything else readily to hand. Yes, these would 
> have originated in xdv2pdf, which began as a somewhat ad hoc tool just 
> to serve my immediate needs, before xetex really started to integrate 
> into the wider *TeX world. I suspect I just started inventing 
> \special{}s on the fly to meet whatever requirements I happened to have. 
> (You have to recall that xetex was originally simply a tool created to 
> serve my own specific use cases; if I needed to do something, I could 
> modify any or all of my macros, the xetex engine, and/or the xdv2pdf 
> driver in whatever way seemed convenient at the time.)
> 
> We would have been using Subversion at SIL back then, so that would be 
> where the oldest source lived, but AFAIK that was decommissioned some 
> years ago and I don't know what became of its history.
> 
> It might also be worth searching archives of the TeX on Mac OS X mailing 
> list <https://email.esm.psu.edu/mailman/listinfo/macosx-tex>, which is 
> probably where the earliest public discussions would have happened. A 
> bit later, the XeTeX list at TUG 
> <https://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex> also got started, but IIRC that 
> was once xetex started to gain some more visibility. I don't remember 
> whether things like Ross's earliest xetex.def came before or after the 
> dedicated XeTeX list was created, but it seems possible we may have 
> corresponded about this stuff on one or other of the lists.
> 
> Good luck!
> 
> Jonathan
> 

Thanks for the info: I've tracked down 
https://tug.org/pipermail/xetex/2004-May/000220.html, which I think 
covers the main x: specials :)

Joseph