[tex-live] xetex.def

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Wed May 10 00:13:45 CEST 2017


    what is the reason for having two .def files here.

I can't imagine an insurmountable technical reason for having two
independent .def files these days. Indeed, it would seem highly
desirable to me to merge them, with conditional parts as needed. It sure
was a pain to be applying changes to both independently, when I was
the one doing that. One of the reasons I was so happy to turn them over
to you guys :).

As I expect you know, they currently exist separately because of their
historical development. xetex.def was based on dvipdfmx.def at the time
of creating XeTeX. And that was reasonable during active XeTeX
development. And so it has continued to the present day.  But nowadays,
when dvipdfmx and xdvipdfmx themselves have been (sort of) merged
(thanks always to Khaled ...), merging the .def files too seems good.

--thanks, karl.


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