[XeTeX] LuaTeX et al

[Will Robertson]

On 11/08/2006, at 3:09 , Taco Hoekwater wrote:

> Will Robertson wrote:
>> Here's a link to the slides for the pdftex extensions discussed at
>> EuroTeX, by the way:
>>   <http://matexhu.org/eurotex2006/lectures/pdftex/>
>> (Careful of that 7MB "fontreader" PDF -- it's not interesting! In  
>> fact,
>> what is it?)
>
> That file is a graphical presentation of traditional TeX's process
> of loading a TFM file, in 700 or so steps (each a metapost graphic
> page).

Ah, no wonder it made no sense to me :)

>> As William has already mentioned, a document compiled with an  
>> OpenType
>> font will result in identical output on any platform supported by  
>> XeTeX
>
> Apologies. It seems I have misunderstood how that part of XeTeX
> works. Does that imply that it can also access uninstalled
> OpenType fonts directly?

That would be better answered by Jonathan Kew; at this stage, no,  
XeTeX still relies on font-config to find the fonts installed. There  
have been requests for access to "uninstalled" fonts, however.

>> This is through its use of the ICU OpenType rendering library; I
>> can't see any reason here to want to reinvent the wheel. Of course,
>> it's only a component of the system you're discussing.
>
> IIRC, ICU does not support the microtypography already present in
> pdfTeX (font expansion, hanging punctuation). But if it does, or if
> it is likely that it will start doing so in the very near future,
> than it is definately worth looking into (so please let me know).

The OpenType format supports margin kerning, but no fonts that  
anyone's heard of actually includes that data. I guess the problem  
for you guys is that ICU is for *OpenType fonts* and you still want  
to provide backwards compatibility support -- and it would be nice to  
have font expansion and hanging punctuation no matter what font  
format is used.

So my reply was a little ill-considered last night; blame long  
working hours!

Good luck!

Will
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