[XeTeX] XeTeX, XeTeXpicfile, and counter-intuitive behaviour

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 04:26:45PM +0000, Philip TAYLOR wrote:

> >Today, we may be able to afford another 50 bytes or so to give more
> >specific error messages to each of two closely-related errors.  But note
> >that adding another error message also means that any set of translated
> >error messages also needs one more entry.  It costs more work than just
> >the 50 bytes of storage.
> 
> And it cost me, and fellow members of this list, considerable work
> to identify the problem.

It's your choice to use low level internals. Higher level interfaces
are already written and some can also be used with plain TeX:

\input miniltx
\def\Gin at driver{xetex.def}
\input graphicx.sty
\resetatcatcode

\noindent
\includegraphics[width=\hsize]{s1.png}
\vfil
\eject
\bye

Thus there is no need to know the difference between the low level
commands \XeTeXpicfile and \XeTeXpdffile for the end user.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko Oberdiek