[XeTeX] Windows tools in XeTeX - what do they do?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 17 Apr 2008, at 4:43 pm, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> Hello,
>
> There are some new executables in w32tex's XeTeX.
>
> sfconv.exe
> teckit_compile.exe
> txtconv.exe
>
> What are they used for (I have no windows computer here to try)?

teckit_compile is used to compile the "font-mapping" files such as  
tex-text.tec, so it's needed if people want to create their own font  
mappings. Until now, we haven't been including this in the TeX Live- 
based distributions, so anyone who wants it would have to get TECkit  
separately (http://scripts.sil.org/TECkit), but I've been thinking  
that we should probably include it.

The other two are command-line encoding conversion utilities that use  
TECkit mappings. I don't think there's really much reason to include  
these in a TeX distribution; they just happen to get built by the  
default makefiles along with the TECkit library that XeTeX uses.

JK