[dvipdfmx] xdvipdfmx/xdv2pdf "x:" specials
Jonathan Kew
jfkthame at gmail.com
Wed Sep 2 12:36:05 CEST 2020
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
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