[XeTeX] XeTeX specials

Jonathan Kew jonathan_kew at sil.org
Sun May 18 16:47:05 CEST 2008


On 17 May 2008, at 3:37 am, Lillie Bennett wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I'm new to XeTeX but have been using pdfTeX for a number of years
> setting directories using plain TeX and heavily modified parts of
> eplain. I've been supporting limited UTF-8, painfully, in pdfTeX so  
> when
> I heard of XeTeX, woo hoo!
>
> Is it true that xdvipdfmx is the default driver the XeTeX runs?

Yes -- unless you're running version 0.996 (or earlier) on Mac OS X,  
in which case it runs the Mac-only xdv2pdf by default, and only uses  
xdvipdfmx if you request it with the -output-driver option.

> I
> haven't been able to find specific docs on it though the dvipdfm(x)
> manuals are very nice.

Use those. xdvipdfmx is essentially dvipdfmx with extensions to  
support the xetex-specific font operations needed.

>
> I'm looking for the XeTeX equivalents to pdfTeX's \pdfhorigin and
> \pdfvorigin but these are probably handled in dvipdfm.

I think the -x and -y options to (x)dvipdfmx would be the way to do  
this. Or simply use TeX's \hoffset and \voffset to move the output to  
wherever you want it.

> Also the list of
> \specials for XeTeX. These offsets change a lot for me so it would be
> nice to be able to specify them from the TeX code.
>
> Can anyone point me in the right direction to answer these questions?

The dvipdfmx documentation is the main resource you need,  
particularly for \specials, etc. xdvipdfx does support a few  
additional \special forms inherited from the earlier xdv2pdf driver,  
but in general these duplicate functionality that you can access via  
the dvipdfmx \specials, and I'd recommend using those for better  
compatibility with other packages and systems.

JK



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