[tex-live] Bad .cfg files in TeX source tree?

Jonathan Kew jonathan_kew at sil.org
Fri Jan 19 15:00:31 CET 2007


On 19 Jan 2007, at 11:32 am, Martin Schröder wrote:

> 2007/1/19, Heiko Oberdiek <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>:
>> other packages as well. I doesn't know XeTeX, but I don't think,
>> that XeTeX will be too happy, if feeded with pdfTeX primitives.

This is true in the general case...

>
> AFAIK XeTeX implements the pdfTeX "api" for setting page dimensions,
> so geometry should be happy.

Right; \pdfpagewidth and \pdfpageheight are supported, so packages  
that want to set page dimensions (such as geometry.sty and crop.sty)  
can use the same code for xetex as for pdftex.

Packages like this that test the engine and configure their back-end  
accordingly need to be updated to support xetex; in many cases, this  
will just mean checking for the xetex engine (e.g. using ifxetex.sty)  
and activating the same code as for pdftex. I haven't had time to  
pursue this with all the package maintainers, though (and until xetex  
became part of mainstream distributions, the incentive to support it  
in standard packages wasn't so strong, either).

The .cfg files in the xelatex tree were created as a workaround to  
get xetex-unaware packages to use the right (pdftex-like) back-end;  
they're not the proper permanent solution, but they've been in use  
for a while now I'm not aware of any reported problems (yet!).

If we can add a test for xetex, and the appropriate driver setup,  
into standard "global" cfg files for these packages, that would be  
preferable. Then the ones in the xelatex subtree could be removed.

JK



More information about the tex-live mailing list