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

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 5:55 PM, Jonathan Kew wrote:
> 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.

Thanks a lot for the explanation. In that case I guess that neither is
needed for our purposes (but teckit_compile might be handy in some
cases).

Mojca