[XeTeX] [tex-live] Future state of XeTeX in TeXLive

maxwell maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu
Fri Oct 28 22:03:54 CEST 2011


On Fri, 28 Oct 2011, William Adams wrote:
> majority of documents are created using GUI tools.   What use cases
> are better served by batch mode, and in what cases is TeX used by
> default because of available GUI tools refuse to play.

We have a process that starts with DocBook (XML) and gets converted to
XeLaTeX using the dblatex program.  We have what I consider to be very good
reasons for this approach (I suppose some on this list might disagree),
including interacting with other XML-based processes, automatic tagging of
words for script, extracting various kinds of data (grammar rules to be
converted into parsers, examples to be converted into test cases for those
parsers, etc.).  So yes, we use batch mode.

I don't know how many other users of dblatex there are, but there seem to
be enough to justify its existence--we didn't create it, we were just lucky
to find it.  (And also fortunate to need xelatex just as it had matured.)

   Mike Maxwell


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