[XeTeX] Re: XeTeX 1.0 - request for comments

[Stephen Moye]

On Tuesday, October 18, 2005, at 06:18AM, Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org> wrote:

>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

WOW! I am terrifically impressed! Just beautiful!! (Sorry for all the exclamation points -- I just can't help it! ;>}) I'm sure there are fine points that should be considered and others, more knowledgeable than I am, will suggest them. But, having spent a good deal of time around Chinese printed materials, I can say that the look is very nearly spot on! (Just one more for the road...)

SGM