[XeTeX] The status of XeTeX

[Philip Taylor]

Apostolos Syropoulos wrote:
>
> And what is wrong in using the color or xcolor (or event the xespotcolor) packages?

The colour (etc) packages are intended to offer colour support for engines such as TeX and PdfTeX that do not offer intrinsic colour support at the primitive level.  XeTeX /does /offer intrinsic colour support at the (\font) primitive level, but that support is currently limited to the RGB colour model.  The colour (etc) packages can, of course, be used with XeTeX, and for some operations their functionality may well be beneficial or even necessary (if one does not want to use \pdfliteral or similar mechanisms), but they do not extend the functionality of the XeTeX \font primitive and are therefore not of direct benefit in the context of the original proposal.  Furthermore, if they are to be used in conjunction with XeTeX rather than with XeLaTeX, they require additional packages such as "miniltx" or "eplain" to be loaded, thus adding considerable overheads (while at the same time reducing robustness, since such packages can and do evolve over time) if one simply wishes to
have one or more fonts rendered in a particular (non-black) colour, functionality which XeTeX natively supports.
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Philip Taylor/