[OS X TeX] XeTeX sources?

[Massimiliano Gubinelli]

I started to write TeXniscope as a dvi previewer with in mind to have a 
fast viewer (i.e. responsive so that changes to the source can be 
reflected as soon as possible in the preview). This is possible as the 
experience with TeXview (on NeXT, people always report that to be a 
great program) or xdvi (which is very fast, IMO). Unfortunately it is 
not so easy to draw TeX fonts on the MacOSX with good quality (as 
MacDviX e.g. shows). Ideally one should be able to use the intrinsic 
PDF support to draw Type1 fonts directly but Apple does not provide a 
sufficiently rich interface to its PDF rendering engine (as NeXT had 
when working with Display PostScript). My strategy up to now has been 
to hack dvipdfm to be used inside the viewer as an interface between 
the dvi format and the graphics driver but it still require much work. 
For example one of the difficulty is that Quartz does not allow to use 
incremental PDF which would be great for parsing pages as they come out 
from TeX....

After this long story (without happy ending -- at least until now) I 
was thinking that maybe is is possible to hack TeX itself to work 
toghether with the viewer to provide flahsmode. And this is the reason 
I wanted to have a look at the sources....

- Just imagine something like a free TeXtures-like app...

Dvipdfm is fast but much of the time it is spent in parsing the fonts, 
subsetting and including them in the PDF (especially when the dvi is 
short).
In this respect XeTeX (as far as I understand) includes standard fonts 
so it should be possible to write a rendered directly in Quartz without 
any intermediate (device independed) stuff. This is not optimal for 
reproducibility of output but this should be intendend only for a fast 
preview of the source. When the document is complete it can be 
processed by standard software (to obtain standard device independent 
outputs).





On 30 Nov 2004, at 11:24, Jonathan Kew wrote:

>
> On 30 Nov 2004, at 9:27 am, Massimiliano Gubinelli wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>  someone knows if XeTeX source code is available?
>>
>
> It isn't, yet, but that's a goal I hope to reach (in the 
> not-too-distant future). It's just a question of finding time to work 
> through both the administrative and technical issues involved.
>
> Do you have specific ideas of what you'd be hoping to do with it?
>
> JK
>
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--------------------- Info ---------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
           & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Post: <mailto:MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>