[tex-live] A few glitches in tlnet/tldev

[Reinhard Kotucha]

George N. White III writes:

 > OS X, being of the BSD inclination, provides curl, so it would be
 > best if the scripts can use either wget or curl.

Thank you very much for this information.  Actually, wget is not really
hardcoded in the installer.  The difficulty is that curl writes to
stdout by default, hence it's not sufficient to replace wget by curl.
I fear that too much has to bee changed, but we'll discuss it internally.

Could you please type the following string on the OS X command line
and send me the result?

   perl -e 'print "$^O\n";'

 > What is needed for xetex?  Documentation would be the first priority.
 > 
 > MiKTeX has:
 > 
 > xetex.1, XeTeX-reference.pdf and tug2003.pdf

We definitely want to have documentation for xetex in TL.  Jonathan,
are you listening?

 > There is:
 > 
 > \special{pdf:pagesize width 8in height 11in}
 > 
 > which can be set (from xetex.1 in miktex) using:
 > 
 > xetex --papersize=string ...
 > 
 > I assume this just adds a pdf:pagesize special for xdvipdfmx, but
 > none of this is suitable for a system-wide configuration.

Yes, I don't know whether xetex supports a sytem-wide configuration
for paper size.  But I have no objections if it doesn't.  The only
reason for adding the letter/a4 switch to the installer was that so
many people asked for it.  My personal opinion is that papersize
declarations should be done in tex documents, otherwise they can't be
shared with people who have different default settings.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
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