[XeTeX] Re: XeTeX 1.0 - request for comments

[Jonathan Kew]

Dear Wai,

Thanks for your message...

On 18 Oct 2005, at 6:07 am, Wai wrote:

>
> Dear Jonathan,
>
> Thank you for asking about XeTeX 1.0. I've installed and tried  
> XeTeX successfully. I certainly like to see it grow to 1.0. I'd  
> like to see it to be ported to other platforms. This certainly  
> cannot be done for 1.0. But from this point of view, I'll suggest  
> to release 1.0 with source code tidied up so that people has a  
> solid base to port it to other platform.

Yes, I hope we'll soon see some real progress in that direction, and  
assistance is very welcome!

>
> On my part, I could spend some effort on porting and on documentation.
> I'd also like to work on supporting different writing directions  
> (obviously this is necessary for Chinese/Japanese/Korean).

I have just put together a sample that shows a feature I'm  
considering for the next release of XeTeX (well, I just implemented  
it yesterday!), making it possible to do vertical text by using a  
combination of a new font attribute "vertical" along with TeX macros  
to rotate the page layout.

Please, those who have an interest in Chinese, etc., take a look at:

     http://www.jfkew.plus.com/ThreeKingdoms.zip
         [approx 700K, hence not sending to the mailing list!]

and let me know any comments you have on this as a possible way  
forward. The archive contains a .tex source file, along with two  
versions of the resulting PDF -- one showing the horizontal rendering  
that XeTeX gives you today, and a second one showing a vertical  
version. (I'm sure there are issues of page design that would need to  
be refined -- don't know how you like to number vertical pages, for  
one example -- but it shows the kind of TeX programming that can be  
used.)

Does this look sufficiently useful that I should go ahead and include  
the "vertical" feature? I don't know enough about Chinese yet to  
really assess the results, but my guess is that with a suitable TeX/ 
LaTeX package to handle the page layout, this could be a usable  
approach.

Jonathan