[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

[Keith J. Schultz]

Hi Apostolos, Ulrike, All,

I agree TFMs are outdated, but for being backwards compatible the functionality
has to be in there.

From what I have so far understood about LuaTeX is that the font loader can handle
about all types of fonts running around, today. Even AAT-fonts. 

In other words there is a possibility to  add ATSUI-functionality. If it is not there already.

LuaTeX handles utf-8 natively and has support for older encodings, so no problem there
either.

One has to keep in mind that LuaTeX is still evolving. The developers have taken a very good
approach:
	1) get LuaTeX-proper working
	2) add needed features
	3) preserve backwards compatibility

Missing features in the handling of eg. not so commonly used OT-features, is not necessarily
an oversight on their part. Just, like the missing language support in TeX.

So far, I do not see why LuaTeX can not have similar functionality as XeTeX. It will have a different
syntax. just as XeTeX is different than LaTeX.

To get there though one has to get involved.  The more involved the better the chance that packages
will be written so it is no longer needed to do the processing by hand. This is the TeX-way.

regards
	Keith.

 
Am 07.08.2012 um 09:06 schrieb Apostolos Syropoulos <asyropoulos at yahoo.com>:

> Ulrike Fischer <news3 at nililand.de> a écrit:
>> 
>> I understand you're concerned about future font support in LuaTeX, but
>> technically the engine is little more than an extendable PDFTeX. Fonts
>> follow that philosophy: TFM (with mapping to T1) fonts are supported
>> as in PDFTeX, other formats must be loaded and processed by hand. Whether
>> it's a good idea or not in that case I don't know, but it is definitely
>> consistent. (Actually I do think it's a good idea, but I accept my
>> opinion might be marginal.)
>> 
> 
> Using TFMs and related technologies seems to me quite outdated. Personally,
> I want to be able to use any font my system includes without having to do
> fancy transformations. This and XeTeX's capability to natively process
> UTF-8 source files were the factors that made me abandon "good", (really)
> old TeX. BTW, TeX itself is consistent too, but it is definitely outdated.
> 

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