[XeTeX] [OS X TeX] XeTeX and pdfpages: no dice?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 13 Apr 2007, at 9:35 am, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 13 avr. 07 à 10:18, Luis Sequeira a écrit :
>
>> I also contacted the author of pdfpages, Andreas Matthias,  
>> inquiring as to the possibility of including support for XeLaTeX.
>> He replied almost immediately and seemed really interested in it,  
>> so I am hopeful that support will indeed come.
>
> Did you also point Andreas Matthias to the more technical answer  
> made on the XeTeX mailing list <http://tug.org/pipermail/xetex/2007- 
> April/006149.html>, which I forwarded yesterday?
>
> If I interpret correctly that part of the answer:
>
>> Le 12 avr. 07 à 14:13, caapv 208 a écrit :
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> All you need are there as long as drivers are concerned.
>> Unfortunately it is not the whole story, however.
>> See the 2nd entry of
>> http://scripts.sil.org/svn-view/xetex/TRUNK/TODO?r1=443&r2=450
>> and consider why Jonathan wrote this :)
>
> then this means that XeTeX's way of handling PDF files is prone to  
> change in the future, with the planned introduction of one control  
> sequence \XeTeXpdffilepages on the TODO list. I imagine this  
> control sequence would allow the inclusion of selected pages of a  
> PDF file.

XeTeX can already include a selected page of a PDF file, using the  
\XeTeXpdffile primitive, which accepts a "page" keyword. This is what  
underlies the PDF support in the graphics package (with [xetex] option).

It should be possible to build pdfpages support on this, except for  
one thing: XeTeX currently has no way to determine the number of  
pages in a PDF file. So we need a new primitive such as  
\XeTeXpdffilepages (or maybe it should be \XeTeXcountpdfpages or  
something) that returns the number of pages in a given file. Then  
pdfpages can iterate over them and place them with \XeTeXpdffile as  
needed.

JK