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

[Zdenek Wagner]

2011/10/28 Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:
>
>
> Zdenek Wagner wrote :
>
>> 2011/10/28 Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd)<P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> :
>
>>> Mojca Miklavec wrote :
>
>>>> Omega was remove because it was buggy, unmaintained, but most
>>>> important of all: hardly usable. It took a genius to figure out how to
>>>> use it, while XeTeX is exactly the contrary. It simplifies everything
>>>> in comparison to pdfTeX.
>>>
>>> I think that last remark is grossly unfair, although probably
>>> not intentionally so.  XeTeX adds functionality that was non-
>>> existent in PdfTeX, but that hardly makes it simpler.  It
>>> also introduces a non-TeXlike syntax, particularly (perhaps
>>> only) in the extended \font primitive that could (IMHO)
>>> have been better thought out, particularly in the overloading
>>> of string quotes and the introduction of square brackets.
>>>
>> If I understand Mojca correctly, she compared XeTeX to Omega.
>
> If that were the case, Zdenek, would Mojca not have written
> "XeTeX is exactly the contrary. It simplifies everything
> in comparison to Omega.", rather than "XeTeX is exactly
> the contrary. It simplifies everything in comparison to pdfTeX."
> which is what she actually wrote ?
>
Well, I I want to typeset a text in Hindi using XeLaTeX, I just type a
text in UTF-8, switch the font (using the fontspec package) by
\fontspec[Script=Devanagari]{fontname} and it works. If I do the same
in lualatex, it does not work, I would have to plug somewhere a lot of
lua code in order to specify how to handle the Devanagari script. The
fontspec package just handles loading the font, not correct rendering
of the text.

> ** Phil.
>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz