[XeTeX] Re: [OS X TeX] gtamacfonts ligatures: PDF searchability

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 28 mars 06 à 18:36, Jonathan Kew a écrit :

> I don't like to pre-announce too much of what I'm trying to do in  
> XeTeX development, partly because it's difficult to predict  
> delivery schedules for this stuff ("real work" keeps getting in the  
> way!), but in view of these comments, perhaps I should let you know  
> a couple of things that are in the pipeline:
>
> On 28 Mar 2006, at 7:16 am, Bruno Voisin wrote:
>
>> But there are at least two reasons for which some people can't use  
>> XeTeX right now as their main TeX platform (apart from the speed  
>> issue, which isn't so important IMO):
>>
>> - The huge number of LaTeX packages which assume you are either  
>> using dvips or pdfTeX, and have no driver file for XeTeX (or, even  
>> worse, bypass the driver file mechanism by hard-coding driver- 
>> specific instructions within the .sty package file itself). Think  
>> of all the users of beamer, for example. And I'm not even speaking  
>> of packages, like pstricks, which rely entirely on dvips.
>
> There is a new driver in development (currently running pretty well  
> on Linux; still needs further work on some of the Mac font support)  
> that is an extended version of DVIPDFMx; thanks to Jin-Hwan Cho for  
> help with this. In addition to being much faster than the current  
> xdv2pdf in many cases, this should allow you to use any package  
> that supports the dvipdfm(x) drivers.
>
>> - The way XeTeX deals with Mac fonts, letting the Mac OS X font  
>> mechanism set the baseline. This results in uneven line spacing,  
>> especially in maths documents with inline subscripts, superscripts  
>> and the like, and makes the output unsuitable for wide  
>> distribution. (I know there are workarounds, involving fussing  
>> with \linespread IIRC, but they are not perfect and require a fair  
>> level of familiarity with plain TeX internals.)
>
> In the current development version of XeTeX, which will be released  
> as 0.991 when I get enough time to put a new package together,  
> there is a parameter \XeTeXuseglyphmetrics you can set that causes  
> the engine to use true glyph height and depth metrics in these  
> computations, instead of the font-wide ascent and descent. (This is  
> an optional setting, as there's a performance hit for using this,  
> and for simple running text it is often not needed.)

Thanks for these very good news!

Bruno------------------------- Info --------------------------
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