[OS X TeX] Malayalam and other Indian languages on Mac

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 07.07.2012 um 21:25 schrieb NMPOST7:

> In fact for the past few years I have used only LaTeX

LaTeX is a large assemblage of TeX macros, written by Leslie Lamport. It is also a TeX FORMAT (.fmt) file and therefore has command line programmes (latex/pdflatex, xelatex, lualatex) for each TeX engine. For particular reasons a (Knuth)TeX engine exists which can produce only DVI. The most widely used engine is pdfTeX. It is completely compatible with original TeX and produces directly PDF. If you invoke it by the name of "latex" it produces DVI. The core of the pdfTeX engine is eTeX (and therefore it can typeset in more directions than from left to right). As with original TeX pdfTeX can only use irregularly encoded fonts via TFM (TeX Font Metrics) files. XeTeX is another engine which uses the font services of its host system and makes direct use of Unicode encoded OT and TT fonts, has no restrictions to the writing direction (eTeX), and also uses more than eight bits for the input encoding. The LuaTeX engine is similar to that of XeTeX, it does not use font services and tries to perform all font understanding by its own – which has to be programmed first. So it still has no knowledge of the Complex Type Layout for Indic scripts, I think.

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Greetings

  Pete

"Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak."