[XeTeX] xdv2pdf vs xdvipdfmx

[Jonathan Kew]

On 29 Jan 2011, at 13:46, Jjgod Jiang wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 6:00 PM, Will Robertson <wspr81 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> (Starting with 10.5, Mac OS X provides a font-from-file function.
>>> A test code does work under my 10.6.)
>> 
>> How does this work? Can you show an example?
> 
> I assume you meant how to modify xdv2pdf and XeTeX to make it (like
> \font\foo="[filename.ttf]") work?
> 
> I'm sure Jonathan knows very well about it since he is an expert of
> ATSUI/ATS. With ATSFontActivateFromFileReference and
> FMGetFontFromATSFontRef it's quite easy to create an ATSUI font from
> user font files. If it doesn't work in xdv2pdf, probably just because
> no one cared to implement it yet.

xdv2pdf was originally written (IIRC) on OS X 10.3, and AFAIK is still compatible with 10.4, perhaps even 10.3.9. The ATSFontActivateFromFileReference API isn't available until 10.5.

At this point, a more worthwhile activity - if someone is interested in reworking the OS X font code in xetex & friends to use newer APIs - would be to replace the use of ATSUI with Core Text. (This would also break compatibility with pre-10.5 systems, but I don't think that's as important now as it was a couple of years ago. Also, it would make a 64-bit build possible.)

JK