[OS X TeX] LaTeXit and output drivers

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 27 juil. 07 à 02:07, Alan Munn a écrit :

> At 11:33 PM +0200 7/26/07, Peter Dyballa wrote:
>> Am 26.07.2007 um 18:26 schrieb Alan Munn:
>>
>>> I'm trying to get LaTeXit to work with xetex, but I need to use  
>>> the xdvipdfmx output driver.
>>
>> Why do you try this?
>
> The main reason I use LaTeXit is to put linguistic tree diagrams  
> into Powerpoint presentations. Why Powerpoint and not beamer? Well,  
> I use beamer for my own presentations, but students and others in  
> our lab use Powerpoint. They can use LaTeXit to draw nice trees  
> without actually having to know any LaTeX.  If I can use xelatex as  
> the engine, I can also match fonts with the regular Mac fonts.
>
> The package that I use (qtree) doesn't work with xelatex unless I  
> use the xdvipdfmx driver. (It draws the labels and not the  
> branches, but doesn't produce errors.)

Based on the recent activity on the XeTeX mailing list, there are  
more and more LaTeX functionality which works when using the  
alternative xdvipdfmx driver but doesn't when using the default  
xdv2pdf driver.

Why is that so? With XeTeX being now cross-platform, and having hence  
gained a lot of visibility, a number of efforts have been made to  
provide compatibility with widespread LaTeX packages such as beamer  
and pdfpages. But these efforts often come from users on Linux and  
Windows, for which xdv2pdf doesn't exist and only xdvipdfmx is  
available.

Another example: the bookmarks created by the hyperref package with  
XeTeX are always working in Adobe Reader, but in Apple's Preview they  
work when created using xdvipdfmx but not when created using xdv2pdf.

I think Jonathan Kew, the developer of XeTeX, is intending to phase  
out xdv2pdf and focus development efforts on xdvipdfmx which would  
become the default driver also on the Mac. A new release 0.997 of  
XeTeX is nearing completion, I don't know whether it will include  
this change already.

Bruno Voisin
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