[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

[Richard Koch]

Dominik,

On Jul 30, 2012, at 8:15 AM, Dominik Wujastyk wrote:

> Not long ago, Jonathan noted about a particular problem that,
> 
> The best chance of fixing this will be if xetex is updated some day to use the new harfbuzz engine, but there's no immediate prospect of that, I'm afraid.
> 
> Like most of us on this list, I use XeTeX, value it enormously, and depend on it for day-to-day work.  But it's becoming clear to me that the long-term maintenance of XeTeX is not assured.  
> 
> Can we discuss this?
> 
> Best,
> Dominik

This worries me as well, since A LOT of people use XeTeX for production level
work. On the Macintosh, XeTeX uses a deprecated font library which Apple
never converted to 64 bits. The latest documentation from Apple says that this library
will be removed entirely in "a future system." That's scary for such a central
component of the TeX distribution.

Dick Koch
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