[XeTeX] Microtype and pdfsync

[Jonathan Kew]

On 28 Oct 2004, at 1:59 pm, William F. Adams wrote:

> On Oct 28, 2004, at 8:27 AM, Simon Spiegel wrote:
>
>> I guess this question is mainly directed at Jonathan. Are there plans 
>> for supporting the microtype and the pdfsync packages? For me, this 
>> is the only thing missing now in XeTeX.
>
> For the interim, you can use the ``hanging'' package from CTAN to use 
> active characters and macros to get hanging punctuation after the 
> example in _The TeXbook_.

A general "microtype"-type package is difficult to integrate with the 
AAT/OT font stuff in the absence of adequate support in the fonts 
themselves. There's an 'opbd' (Optical Bounds) table defined for AAT, 
for example, but I don't know of any available fonts that include this.

A direct "port" of the pdfTeX implementation isn't realistic because in 
XeTeX, the TeX-level typesetting engine doesn't have direct knowledge 
about the actual glyphs that will be rendered. (pdfTeX, like standard 
TeX, doesn't implement the full character/glyph model; it treats 
characters and glyphs as synonymous.)

> For the latter, I just use a plain document setup which loads CMR 
> instead of whatever fonts I've set up and pdfsync and use that for 
> anything involving more than a bare minimum of textual editing.

I believe it would be possible for a resourceful user to implement 
pdfsync functionality with today's XeTeX by extending the 
xdv2pdf_mergemarks utility (it's currently a Perl script, though you 
could rewrite it in some other language if preferred); I mentioned this 
in a posting a week or two back. I'll probably work on this at some 
point, but if anyone else gets there first, that's fine! :-)

OTOH, running a plain CMR setup with pdfLaTeX would still give you 
*much* faster turnaround, as the Quartz-based PDF generation XeTeX uses 
is really slow. Unfortunately, there's only so much I can do about 
that.

JK