[XeTeX] Re: [MacTeX] XeTeX

[William F. Adams]

On Thursday, April 15, 2004, at 04:51  AM, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> XeTeX isn't attempting to "compete" in the standard TeX world. I hope 
> it will be able to process standard documents using standard fonts 
> correctly (and clearly it's not there yet!), it will never be as 
> efficient as pdfTeX for that purpose. But its purpose is to provide a 
> high-end typesetting tool that works easily with Unicode and AAT 
> fonts, and in particular with complex scripts. To achieve that, it 
> sacrifices platform independence and source document portability. And 
> for many users, that's a price not worth paying, I realize that.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that we'll be able to do font support nicely 
in packages so that it will be transparent and automatic and 
self-configuring / adapting to whatever platform / system is being 
used.

There is a \ifxetex or \ifaat test, right?

> Having said that, I'm delighted to see the level of interest in this, 
> and hope that we can make it into something that works smoothly and 
> well.

Actually, I think it may eventually be much more widely useful, if only 
to spur on those Omega guys ;)

Seriously, this concept should be adaptable to pdftex and OpenType, no? 
It'll just be necessary to plug-in a rendering engine for that --- 
wouldn't pango work?

William

-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com

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