[tex-live] bringing xetex to texlive

[Jonathan Kew]

On 19 May 2006, at 1:18 am, Karl Berry wrote:

> Hi Jonathan,
>
>     I'd like to work towards getting the XeTeX project (derivative  
> of e-
>     TeX with Unicode and OpenType support) integrated into TeX Live
>
> Very exciting!  Thanks.
>
> Now that xetex is multiplatform, I wonder if, in the fullness of time,
> the xetex extensions can be integrated with the pdftex extensions
> (present and future).  I doubt it's the easiest thing technically, but
> it seems there may be some overlap in functionality.

That's certainly a worthwhile goal; if some day pdftex has sufficient  
Unicode and OpenType support that xetex becomes obsolete, that'll be  
fine with me! :) And if sharing ideas and code can help that to  
happen, great. XeTeX was created as an independent extension using  
the techniques that I felt would enable me to achieve useful  
functionality most easily and quickly, and allow me to experiment  
freely within a system that I understood, but as things mature,  
convergence with pdftex would be wonderful.

>     on a year-old snapshot of sources from TL),
>
> I don't think you'll find much has changed.
>
>     there are of course a few changes to shared files in web2c/lib,  
> etc.,
>
> FYI, the original source for web2c remains on Olaf's private machines.
> It's fine to check in changes to TL,

Of course, it'll be a while before I have anything to check in  
anyhow, as I'll need to bring everything up-to-date locally first.

> Olaf checks back and forth, but it
> would be good to communicate changes in the shared files on
> tex-k at tug.org, maybe even before checking them in.

OK, that's good to know. I've just sent a subscription request to tex-k.

>     The latter may eventually be merged back into the main dvipdfmx
>     project
>
> I hope so.  There are too many dvi-to-pdf variants already.  The
> dvipdfmx maintainers have been pretty responsive.

I hope so too, and Chof and I were thinking in that direction from  
the start. But at this point, we need to have an experimental test- 
bed for the xetex extensions, without destabilizing the main dvipdfmx  
driver. It's early days yet....

JK