[OS X TeX] Re: Good bye!

[Thoeger Juul Thorsen]

I am growing increasingly curious about XeTeX, but I do have some doubts
still.

First of all: does XeTeX know *all* latex commands, and does it handle
all different packages? For instance, does XeTeX recognise Marginpars,
fancyhdrs, hyperref etc.?

/Thøger



--
'Menneskehedens største håb for fremtiden er, at
opdragelsen altid til en vis grad mislykkes'
-Jørn Madsen

--
'En mand er ikke en mand,
før han har dræbt en mand og avlet en mand'
-Afghansk ordsprog

-- 
'Kvinder har ikke brug for penge: De ryger ikke, de drikker ikke, og
kvindfolk er de jo selv.'
-Svensk ordsprog

On Mon, 31 Jan 2005, Frank STENGEL wrote:

>
> Le 31 janv. 05, à 02:00, david craig a écrit :
>
> >
> >> Concerning fonts,TeX behaves like a program written in Stone Ages.
> >
> > Well, it was, but that's beside the point.
> >
> > I've been using TeX for maybe 17 years, and I'm as shocked as you are
> > that the state of affairs vis a vis fonts has been permitted to remain
> > as appalling as it is.
>
> Indeed. however, font managing is a very tricky affair. As it turns out
> fonts are, in many ways, very OS (even software) dependant. You simply
> need to listen to the woes of those who have (tried to) transfer Word
> documents across OSes or versions. The same font does not always
> produce the same output in MacOS or in Windows. What I mean the font
> may have the same name / optical size, but the same words will not
> print out the same (different length / height)...
>
> What makes TeX font management neolithic is
> * its strict adherence to *compatibility* and *portability* across OSes
> and teX engines;
> * the unusual layout standard TeX fonts were designed with.
>
> What causes the most problems is the second point. To use a non-TeX
> font in TeX, one has to re-encode it. It takes a lot of work even if
> one uses fontinst to help. Furthermore, fonts that can be used with
> mathematics are very rare.
>
> Font management in TeX changed radically with the arrival of LaTeX2e:
> when NFSS came to be (im unsure as to exactly when, somewhere around
> the mid-nineties), one coud at last choose to use a font family that
> wasn't Computer Modern, but the choices were limited...
>
> If one is ready to loose cross-OS portability, one could use XeTeX: all
> the power of TeX with the multitude of OS X fonts.
>
> --
> Frank STENGEL (fstengel<at>mac.com)
>
> --------------------- Info ---------------------
> Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
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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>