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

[Chris Travers]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 9:54 AM, George N. White III <gnwiii at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 11:00 AM, William Adams <will.adams at frycomm.com> wrote:
>> On Oct 28, 2011, at 9:00 AM, Dominik Wujastyk wrote:
>>
>>> Personally, I would not mind if XeTeX went into maintenance mode.  I like such stability.  It already has a great deal of functionality, probably enough to last me the rest of my writing career.  I do take Vafa's point, though, that if future OS platforms break XeTeX, it would be nice to have someone fix things up.
>>
>> Here in the U.S., it's almost time for United Way payroll deduction contributions to be allocated --- I've been donating to TUG for a couple of years, but would be willing to direct my TUG contribution to XeTeX maintenance if others would be similarly inclined.
>>
>
> Money can help, but unless very big piles of it are available, it is
> more critical to generate a passion for good typography in people who
> have the techical abilities needed for the work. I conjecture that the
> number of people with both the passion and abilities needed is
> currently empty.  Clearly there are many current xetex users with the
> interest, and commercial software developers employ people to write
> code to render texts using the MS and Apple API's, so there are also
> people with the abilities.  Some may not be able to  contribute to
> xetex by the terms of their employment, and some whose passion lies
> with their employers products would not have considered contributing
> to xetex.
>
> Knuth has made many outstanding contributions, but not the least is to
> raise typography to the first rank of problems in computing.   If you
> want to create a pool of people with a passion for computer
> typography, effort needs to go towards expanding awareness of Knuth's
> work in typography and issues that remain.
>
> To get things started, here is my list:
>
> 0.  Why is Tex still necessary?   My impression is that Knuth hoped to
> see his work used in more creative ways than TeX distros.

Tex distros are nice toolbixes, but they don't begin to describe how
TeX or the distro is used.  See below for a list.....  One of the
reasons I have been so pedantic about long-term support is that
long-term support makes possible many creative uses.

>
> 1.  Knuth wanted to create beautiful books, yet many distinctly
> unbeautiful books are still being published.   Lack of support for
> font design size, too similar fonts used for text and maths (e.g.,
> same glyph for letter "a" and variable "a") contribute to lack of
> beauty.   I'm reminded of Knuth's early paper in which he analyzed
> bugs in discarded decks of punched cards and found many examples of
> errors resulting from failure to apply well-known principles taught in
> into courses.

A couple things I'd point out.  TeX makes it possible to create
beautiful books.  LaTeX makes it possible to create beautiful books
easily.
>
> 2.  Knuth created his own fonts and tools and these are still part of
> a TeX system.   What problems are still present in the fonts and
> support provided by modern GUI environments?

A GUI environment is very efficient at displaying information to the
user, but very bad at accepting input from a user.  This is a
fundamental problem with the GUI:  mouse clicks provide less
information to the computer than keystrokes.  GUI's are popular
because they provide more information to the user than a keyboard
driven interface (whether like a CLI or a system like LaTeX).

So from this perspective, professional, keyboard-driven environments
will always beat out pretty displays for productivity.

I've done my business logo in LaTeX, my book in LaTeX.  My accounting
system generates invoices using LaTeX.....  Sometimes I use graphical
tools to do some things (diagrams are generally easier to do with xfig
and then export to LaTeX, and then tweak in vim).

TeX and friends are wonderful tools for creating beautiful documents.

A second thing is that TeX typesetting is better than most things that
are done in a GUI.  Even where a GUI can be helpful (layout of some
sorts of documents), it's so much nicer when one can embed LaTeX in
frames (like using Scribus with LaTeX frames).

>
> 3.  Knuth was concerned with maths.   There are now many groups that
> use TeX for documents that do not involved maths.  What do the
> descendants of TeX have that other general purpose tools lack?

I am not in these circles and will leave it to others to advocate there.
>
> 4.  Knuth was concerned primarily with typeset material.   Since then
> there have been developments in linearization/flattened maths for
> communications, and math markup for web (html) documents.

Markups are fine for describing a general layout but they don't do the
typesetting any more than HTML micro-manages the kerning in your web
browser.  Even CSS with HTML doesn't provide the beautiful layout that
LaTeX does.  So as a typesetting engine, there is no reason not to use
TeX and LaTeX where it matters.

>
> 5.   Knuth built a compiler that is used in batch mode, but the
> 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.

A compiler-based approach is much more flexible than an approach
tightly integrated with the GUI.  As it is, you can take
OOo/LibreOffice documents (or anything these formats can read) and
export a structured document that can be transformed into TeX or
LaTeX.  So where it matters one can transform other documents into
LaTeX or even TeX and render them.

Another possibility is to integrate LaTeX into GUI-based tools.
Scribus, for example, gives the option to embed LaTeX frames inside
other document types.

Finally none of this says a GUI is out of the question.  Not only can
you have a structured document but there is no reason in principle you
can't use a WYSIWIG editor to get an approximation and have a rendered
output available on demand.  I don't know any editors that do this,
but it is quite possible.

For my money, I advocate LaTeX and TeX within a number of circles.  I
point out my book was written using it.  I demonstrate what we can do
with check printing and invoice printing in LedgerSMB.  And so forth.
The thing is there are surprisingly few people who realize how
important typesetting is, but I try to recruit those as well to the
cause.  I have been immensely impressed by TeX and LaTeX, and I think
it would be nice to have good Unicode support in these environments
(of which XeTeX is really the best option at the moment).

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers