[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Philipp Stephani]

Am 03.10.2010 um 10:00 schrieb Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd):

> 
> 
> Philipp Stephani wrote:
> 
>> Here (in German):
>> http://www.golatex.de/latex-mathe-font-fuer-bildschirm-t3664.html
>> 
>> Although I have to admit that in that case the quality is more related to the font and not so much to the typesetting. But see Ulrik's article for an overview of the improvements made possible by OpenType math.
> 
> Yes, two points emerge from that :
> 
> 1) The questioner admits that he is a beginner at LaTeX :
> 
> 	bin LaTeX Anfänger
> 
> 2) The question was about fonts rather than how to accomplish
>   something maths-related in LaTeX that could be better done
>   in Word 2007.
> 
> Whilst I am willing to accept that Word 2007 & 2010, for the first
> time in the history of Word, are now capable of typesetting some
> mathematics with a reasonable degree of sophistication, I have
> yet to see any evidence that either can surpass TeX for complex
> mathematical formulae.

A very good source is Murray Sargent's blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/murrays/
e.g. this (quite technical) post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/murrays/archive/2006/09/13/752206.aspx
"The new font tables enable one to automatically position subscripts and superscripts horizontally better than untweaked TeX as well as having richer glyph choices for operators like the integral sign, square root, and growable brackets."
"In addition math characters have four cut-in values, one for each corner, allowing sub/superscripts to be kerned with their bases."
TeX, on the other hand, (ab)uses the italic correction for superscript/subscript positioning, which is not as flexible as the OpenType approach.

> 
> As an aside, the Unicode Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics,
> Version 3 (Unicode Technical Note #28) [1] makes very interesting reading.

Also mentioned in the blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/murrays/archive/2010/03/13/linear-format-version-3.aspx