[XeTeX] First experiences with xetex and some bugs

[William Clocksin]

I agree with Steffen (extracted below).  Xetex should appear to add to 
TeX, not diverge from it.  Lots of potential users have legacy files 
containing escape sequences and also need to share bibtex files. There 
is no reason why xetex should not support escape sequences.  Being able 
to support escape sequences does not detract from the 'purity' of 
xetex, as the escape sequences should merely encode a unicode 
equivalent.

Also, as someone who needs to write Syriac, Arabic and mathematics in 
the same document, I hope for full maths support in xetex in due course.

William

On Sunday, Jul 4, 2004, at 13:07 Europe/London, Steffen Prohaska wrote:
> ...A design decision made in xetex is to completely switch to unicode 
> and don't
> support any old tex encoding. The changes in the encoding of quotes 
> (''),
> dashes (--), special characters (\"a, \"o) etc. make it really hard to 
> switch.
> You either have to recode all your input files or you can't use xetex.
>
> Especially for bibtex files this is a show stopper...

> ... I still use TeX especially because of the simplicity of using
> math. But the math fonts have to follow the other fonts at least to 
> some extent.
> If xetex doesn't provide a way this will be a show stopper for me...

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Professor W.F. Clocksin
Department of Computing
Oxford Brookes University
Wheatley, Oxford OX33 1HX

www.clocksin.com
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