[XeTeX] paper available

Will Robertson will at guerilla.net.au
Mon Apr 18 18:24:42 CEST 2005


(Don't you hate it when you highjack a thread and forget to change the 
name until it's too late to bother doing anything about it?)

On 19 Apr 2005, at 12:52 AM, Jonathan Kew wrote:
> On 18 Apr 2005, at 4:01 pm, Will Robertson wrote:
>
>> By the way, how do you like the sound of the options "[Renderer=AAT]" 
>> and "[Renderer=OpenType]"? It's not strictly correct, but I couldn't 
>> think of an easy way to describe it otherwise...
>
> Hmm.... [Renderer=OpenType] will be a problem when there are multiple 
> possible renderers supporting OpenType tables. (Before anyone jumps to 
> conclusions, bear in mind that there's been talk of OT Layout support 
> in Tiger, which means that the ATSUI-based renderer will presumably 
> start doing some OpenType as well.) So I'd prefer to see this as 
> [Renderer=ICU], I think.
>
> And how about [Renderer=ATSUI] rather than AAT? Strictly speaking, AAT 
> is the font technology; ATSUI is the renderer--and as noted, it may 
> start doing OT as well as AAT layout soon. (Yes, I know the actual 
> XeTeX option is wrong on this too. Maybe I should change it before 
> it's too firmly entrenched.) Or if "ATSUI" seems too obscure for 
> users, what about [Renderer=OSX]?

"Hmmm" indeed! It really might depend on how Apple's ATSUI renderer 
deals with OpenType -- if it ends up using the same interface in XeTeX 
as the ICU renderer, then for the internal purposes of fontspec at 
least it's the font technology that counts and not the renderer. (Which 
is where I'm having the issues.)

I think I might let this one sit until I've got a firmer idea of what's 
going to happen with Tiger. (Do you actually not know anything about 
Tiger's OpenType support, Jonathan? Or are you just good at sticking to 
NDAs? Oh wait, you can't answer that without implying that you are 
indeed under one, so it's probably better to ignore the question.)

Anyway, even if Tiger does support Unicode, I presume that you're going 
to be wanting to stick with the ICU renderer as much as possible in 
order to be able to keep XeTeX as platform agnostic as you can...

W



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