[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/8/8 Paul Isambert <zappathustra at free.fr>:
> Ulrike Fischer <news3 at nililand.de> a écrit:
>> ...
>> LaTeX (and the other formats) were neglected because the development
>> of a vital part of the luatex-project - the open type font loader -
>> has not be developed in a format independant way.
>
> It has been, to some extent; and it's only transitional.
>
The LaTeX users do not need much, just luaotfload + fontspec +
polyglossia, all the rest can be taken from old LaTeX. And nice lua
features can be used to extend LaTeX.

> A 100% format-independent fontloader isn't really possible, unless you
> freeze it completely. If you want to add your own bells and whistles,
> which is what LuaTeX is about as far as I'm concerned, you have to
> adapt it, or better, in the case of formats, write it from scratch.
>
As a matter of fact from the user's point of view fonts can now be
handled in much easier way as never before. I buy a family of fonts,
put them to a directory where the operating system expects them and
that's it, fontspec does the rest. No tfm, no vf, no fd files. And
cryptic font names are no longer needed.

> Best,
> Paul
>
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz