[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[David J. Perry]

Alan Munn wrote:
>
> Why should the average person need to learn to program a computer?  It's 
> like asking why they should learn to repair their fridge.  But of  course 
> when a student bumps up against TeX, they are confronted with  many things 
> which are truly out of their actual experience with  computers (again, for 
> most people).

The experiences that some of us had years ago are very different from what 
kids today have (mostly, anyway).  When I bought my first computer 25 years 
ago, I learned a little BASIC, mostly out of curiosity about how one made 
the darn things run (and decided that I didn't want to be a programmer).  I 
also used a word processor that required one to type in codes for bold, 
italic, paragraph indentations, and other things; the screen display did not 
look like the printed output.  When, in these latter days, I decided to 
learn Xe(La)TeX, this background made things easier for me.  I suspect that 
when people who have grown up with only GUIs have a lot of learning to do in 
order to understand the whole non-WYSIWYG idea and why someone might want to 
do things that way.  lshort or our nascent XeTeX opus needs to take this 
into account.

David