[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/7/31 Martin Schröder <martin at oneiros.de>:
> 2012/7/30 Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:
>> case.  But differences at the syntactic level are a far greater
>> concern : I think one should accept that if one passes an extant
>> XeTeX source through LuaTeX, line and page breaks may well differ,
>> but if LuaTeX barfs on valid XeTeX source, that is (for me, at
>> least) a far greater concern (and a reason against adoption, to
>> be honest).
>
> That's why you should use ConTeXt or LaTeX, which will isolate your
> document from differences in the engine.
>
Not always, Examples:

1. Polyglossia (XeLaTeX only)
2. Accented characters in PDF outlines (works fine in XeLaTeX,
difficult to do in LaTeX)
3. Input file in UTF-8 (no problem in XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX, difficult
to do in LaTeX - the inputenc package sets the \catcode of the first
part of a character to 13, therefore \futurelet\nextchar\dosomething
fails, placing a macro requesting a single parameter to \everypar for
geting and positioning the first character of a paragraph in a
different font will also fail; enxTeX does not have these problems but
may cause other problems elsewhere)
4. Setting PDF version: does XeTeX support \pdfminorversion and does
it send a proper command to the xdv->pdf driver? I have not found such
feature in the dvipdfmx manual.

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