[XeTeX] Fonts in the XeTeX installer?

[Will Robertson]

Hi William,

I take it you're not against the idea, then :)

On 03/07/2006, at 21:46 , William Adams wrote:

> It seems to me that this is a point at which one could then begin
> thinking about a minimal xelatex distribution optimised around
> Unicode and with _no_ support for legacy fonts or encodings.

Seeing as the support is already there, I see no point in removing it.
But this approach I feel encourages a bit more progress.

> Isn't creating a Unicode-encoded math font for Latin Modern in the
> works?

Eventually, but not by the Latin Modern team at this stage.
Johannes Kuester has it on the cards (www.typoma.com) but no work has  
been done yet as far as I'm aware.

> What if one took plain.tex, renamed it, re-worked it to support /
> make use of Unicode-encoded fonts including math --- would this then
> make creating a Unicode-oriented successor to Babel easier?

This is kind of another issue. All the hard stuff that Babel does is  
essentially solved by XeTeX, it's just the interfaces that need to be  
re-implemented without the cruft. And no-one who knows how has the  
time :)

If anyone were to attempt this effort, (I think I've said this  
before) they should correspond with Javier Bezos, who's developed the  
mem multilingual package for Aleph. It's be great (and appropriate)  
to collaborate with him on the whole thing.

Will