[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

[Khaled Hosny]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 01:32:31PM +0200, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> 2012/7/31 Martin Schröder <martin at oneiros.de>:
> >> For very good reason! "\pdfminorversion" is not only some monadic number, it's also a guarantee that this document conforms to a particular standard.
> >
> > Not really. In pdfTeX the version enables certain features (object
> > streams, png inclusion).
> > But no guarantee is made for included pdfs: At most you will get a
> > warning in stderr
> > (if you include a higher pdf version than the main document).
> >
> That's what I mean. If an author of a TeX document knows that the PDF
> must be in version 1.3, then for pdftex it can be set by
> \pdfminorversion=3 and pdftex will not only set this number in the
> header but disable certain features not allowed in v.1.3. If the same
> should be done in XeTeX, there is no way how to do it from the TeX
> source code, it is necessary (for someone who fill prepare PDF,
> possibly not the author) to read the whole source text and look,
> whether there is a comment that specifies output as PDF 1.3, and if
> so, call xdvipdfmx with -V 3. Thus the source text cannot contain
> machine readable instructions for its processing. It would be better
> if the same information as "-V 3" could also be sent via a special.

I think it is possible to have a primitive that just passes the value to
xdvipdfmx, shouldn't be hard, and if someone comes with a patch I'll
gladly apply it.

Regards,
 Khaled