[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Wed Aug 1 19:20:13 CEST 2012


2012/8/1 Arthur Reutenauer <arthur.reutenauer at normalesup.org>:
>   Ha, I was wondering how long it would take for someone to notice :-)
>
>   I just started porting Polyglossia to LuaTeX.  I didn't have time to
> do much yet, but I expect it's going to be a matter of days till all the
> gloss files work.  For the moment, all the languages relying on XeTeX's
> inter-character token mechanism will fail, but I know how to implement
> it in LuaTeX.  It has been discussed several times already and I don't
> expect there will be major problems; although of course it will be
> experimental at first.
>
Whenever anything is available for testing, I can try some Czech and
Slovak texts.

>   What's important to understand, though, is that this does not address
> the underlying issues: LuaTeX still lacks a full OpenType shaping
> engine, so that won't do anything for Indic scripts, scripts from
> South-East Asia, Old Korean, nor other "complex" writing systems.
> Arabic should work fine, but I'm not even sure about Syriac, for
> example.
>
How about Urdu? It will be difficult for me but I can try to run some tests.

>   As for the discussion at hand, I have no intention to participate in
> it -- although I'm afraid I'm going to be dragged into it.  This kind of
> talk is one of the most demotivating phenomena in open source
> development, or in any volunteer community, for that matter.  Having to
> go over hundreds and hundreds of emails in a couple of days, few of
> which seem to focus on concrete issues (when they're not unmitigated
> drivel), just drains any person's enthusiasm and energy -- not to
> mention time.  As Simon Spiegel asked what the reason was for the
> seemingly little progress in the XeTeX world in the past couple of
> years, I can answer for my part: this is it.  This kind of endless
> threads on mailing-lists is the main organic reason why I don't invest
> more time in development, as far as I'm concerned.  And I'm sure this is
> the case for other core developers too.
>
>         Arthur
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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