[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) P.Taylor at Rhul.Ac.Uk
Thu Sep 30 00:02:29 CEST 2010



Philipp Stephani wrote:

>Beginners usually know how to visit web sites
> and how to create simple documents in Microsoft Word

OK, so let's teach them how to create Unicode TeX sources using MS Word :-)

Just as an experiment, I tried it; the "Save as" was the hard part, since
UTF-8 was not offered as a default, despite the fact that the document
contained something that is pretty hard to represent in anything else :

Hàn Thế Thành
\end

But I finally managed it, then tried to typeset it using XeTeX.
Result : disaster (see attached).

We'd better make sure that XeLshort advises users to select
a Unicode-compatible font as default, which XeTeX clearly doesn't.

Incidentally, it also demonstrates a strange bug/feature/w-h-y
in the Win32 implementation of XeTeX; my source file was called
HTT.tex, so the resulting PDF should have been called HTT.pdf,
and that is what the log file claims was generated :

> E:\TeX\Projects\Tests>xetex HTT
> This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.2-0.9997.3 (Web2C 2010)
> entering extended mode
> (./HTT.tex [1] )
> (see the transcript file for additional information)
> Output written on HTT.pdf (1 page).
> Transcript written on HTT.log.

Yet it wasn't; it was called htt.pdf, simply because there
was already an htt.pdf in the current directory.

> E:\TeX\Projects\Tests>dir HTT.*
>  Volume in drive E is OneTouch4
>  Volume Serial Number is E79A-BF54
>
>  Directory of E:\TeX\Projects\Tests
>
> 29-Sep-2010  22:59               359 htt.log
> 29-Sep-2010  22:59             1,746 htt.pdf
> 29-Sep-2010  22:48                28 HTT.tex
>                3 File(s)          2,133 bytes
>                0 Dir(s)  63,364,755,456 bytes free
>
> E:\TeX\Projects\Tests>

** Phil.
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