[XeTeX] Drawing package for XeTeX in plain TeX?

[Olivier Binda]

PGF/TikZ works really fine with XeTeX.

It only has a few caveat compared to pstricks such as : as there is no 
inline graphics possibility, you have to rely on exterenal programms for 
that (gnu plot, mathematica, etc..)

It is easy, powerfull and well designed.
It produces beautifull pictures and it is very fast (and you don't have 
to rely on postscript anymore).

One big advantage of Tikz/pgf is that it produces svg pictures...So, 
with pgf/Tikz+XeTeX, you can produce the same pictures for HTML output  
as for PDF output (and pstricks doesn't do that, if I'm not mistaken...)

Indeed,  Eitan Gurary has implemented (as of 24/04/2007) initial support 
in tex4ht for XeTeX
(It works great, nearly all TeX features are implemented...but XeTeX 
specifics (like non-TeX font management, etc...) aren't for the moment 
though they might be in the future as he wrote himself on the 24/04/2007 :

 >Now that I have access to the code of xdv2pdf and xdvipdfmx I believe

>I can use those programs to fully learn how the fonts are being
>handled by XeTeX.  Most of the job probably would be to extract a few
>XeTeX pieces of code from xdvipdfmx and modify them to the needs of
>tex4ht.  However, my concern it will take me quite a few additional
>weeks to do the job, on top of the week it already took me to modify
>tex4ht to avoid the non-tex fonts, and I can't afford such an
>investment of time now.

>Getting someone with a knowledge similar to that of Jonathan Kew
>contracted to do some of the job and provide guidance might make the
>task much easier to accomplish.  I don't feel comfortable to approach
>others to ask for such help.

>-eitan

As you can see, he might be a little shy to approach Jonathan for help...

Well, It's probably very unpolite from me to ask this but this would profit us all 
(Pgf/Tikz+XeteX producing (x)Html +svg+ mathml code...wouldn't this be nice ?) : 

Jonathan, would it be possible for you to help Eitan Gurary a little bit ? 

If Eitan could get the answers to  a few questions or talk 10 minutes with you, it might bring even better support for TeX4ht and XeTeX and spare him weeks deciphering code and trying to find the answers all by himself.

Olivier Binda
ps : I beg forgivance to Eitan and Jonathan for my rudeness