[XeTeX] Re: [MacTeX] XeTeX

Ross Moore ross at ics.mq.edu.au
Sat Apr 10 01:50:47 CEST 2004


Hi Bruce,

On 10/04/2004, at 9:08 AM, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:

>
> On Apr 9, 2004, at 6:53 PM, Wendy McKay wrote:
>
>> Do you know anything about the company?
>
> Only that there's some sinister Mormon connection, which is why their 
> interest in international text production.
>
> That aside, I can contact them, though I wonder if William might be 
> better because I presume he's had some contact with these people 
> before.  We could work together on it, though.  I think a short 
> explanation of what this group does, the font-related goals, and how 
> XeTeX could contribute to that would be all that's needed.
>
> I gotta believe there's a way to realize some of the goals discussed 
> here previously using this tool.  Nevertheless, even this then has 
> limitations (input files must be unicode).

   ... and hyphenation isn't implemented within ATSUI fonts.

Have you read the  XeTeX-notes.tex  file, from the "XeTeX Samples" pack?

This gives a pretty good idea of what has, and has not, been done.


It looks like the  xetex  binary is essentially  eTeX, with the \font 
primitive
redefined to give access to Apple's APIs for working with ATSUI fonts.
Also there are changes for:
   1.  importing graphics, using an API to QuickDraw
   2.  output in an "extended" DVI format (.xdvi)

plus a binary  xdv2pdf  to do the conversion  .xdvi --> PDF .


Note that xetex is based upon  eTeX  rather than pdf-eTeX.

So some of TeXShop's PDF-based capabilities (e.g. dragging graphics) may
not work properly yet -- the PDF graphics will need to be included via
the QuickDraw API, and may need a change to the automatically-generated
LaTeX source for the graphics inclusion.
But then again, maybe this just works --- something to test !


>
> I'd really like to see them release the source code for others to run 
> with...

That would certainly be interesting to have.


Cheers

	Ross

>
> Bruce
>
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>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ross Moore                                         ross at maths.mq.edu.au
Mathematics Department                             office: E7A-419
Macquarie University                               tel: +61 +2 9850 8955
Sydney, Australia                                  fax: +61 +2 9850 8114
------------------------------------------------------------------------


------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ross Moore                                         ross at maths.mq.edu.au
Mathematics Department                             office: E7A-419
Macquarie University                               tel: +61 +2 9850 8955
Sydney, Australia                                  fax: +61 +2 9850 8114
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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