[XeTeX] XeTeX maintenance

[Philip Taylor]

Joseph Wright wrote:

> Somewhat away from the original topic, but it strikes me that building a
> tagged PDF is going to be much more problematic at the macro layer than
> at the engine level: is that fair? Deciding what elements of a document
> are 'structure' is hard, and in 'real' documents it's not unusual to see
> a lot of input that's more about appearance than structure. That of
> course isn't limited to TeX: I suspect anyone trying to generate tagged
> output has the same concern (users do odd things).

Going even further off-topic, but pursuing this one aspect of the
thread, is there not only real one problem :  the need to educate users
to cease marking up their documents in raw (La)TeX syntax, and instead
to express them in well-formed XML ?  I have just finished typesetting
(using [plain] XeTeX) a 544pp book marked up entirely in XML, and whilst
I have made no efforts to generate PDF/UA, I am convinced that the task
of so doing (assuming that the necessary primitives are or were
available in XeTeX) would have been 1/1000 of the effort needed to do so
had the book been marked up in traditional (La)TeX syntax with its usual
accompanying conflation of form and content.

** Phil.