[OS X TeX] XeTeX

Bruno Voisin bvoisin at mac.com
Tue Apr 13 23:32:56 CEST 2004


Le 13 avr. 04, à 23:08, Mark Moll a écrit :

> This is pretty cool! It seems it would still be fairly non-trivial, 
> though, to make the latex font size commands and commands like 
> \textbf, \textit, and \textsc do the right thing. Can 
> \DeclareFontFamily and \DeclareFontShape be adapted for xetex?

Sorry, my announcement was probably premature. Since last week there's 
been some intensive testing by various people on the original list the 
announcement came from, and it seems that the software is not yet ready 
for distribution (which is quite normal, after all, given the 0.3 
version number).

A LaTeX format can be compiled and even made available in TeXShop 
(after installing the XeTeX .pkg file first, that is):

> 1. Run "xeinitex -jobname=xelatex latex.ltx".
>
> 2. Move the created xelatex.xfmt to 
> /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/web2c/.
>
> 3. Move to /usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current and run 
> "ln -s xetex xelatex", to created a symlink xelatex to xetex.
>
> 4. Run "sudo texhash".
>
> 5. In TeXShop, define xelatex to be your personal LaTeX script.

However, it appears XeTeX has bugs, and also be prepared that the usual 
LaTeX packages like color and graphics won't work as expected, cos' 
there ain't no driver files for the new engine XeTeX (compared with 
pdfTeX or dvips).

It has also been noticed that XeTeX can produce PDF files much much 
larger in size than pdfTeX or TeX + dvips + ps2pdf. I've tried on a 
plain TeX file of mine, which uses CM fonts only and creates 4-pages 
output. pdfTeX produces a PDF file 84 kb in size, and XeTeX a file 15.9 
Mb (sic!) in size.

It would also be probably a hard job to adapt \DeclareFontFamily and 
\DeclareFontShape for XeTeX.

Sorry for the premature announcement,

Bruno Voisin
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