[texhax] Fwd: kerTeX: TeX and al. under BSD license

Philip TAYLOR P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk
Mon Dec 19 23:14:07 CET 2011



tlaronde at polynum.com wrote:

> If it is a patched version of TeX, I have significantly reorganized and
> simplified the whole hierarchy, so it should be easy to just adapt the
> change files starting with the vanilla TeX instances (initex, virtex and
> triptex).

It is indeed "a patched version of TeX", but the "patches"
are very powerful and provide much-needed functionality :

	http://tex.loria.fr/moteurs/etex_ref.html
	http://tex.loria.fr/moteurs/etex2_man.pdf

> But it is not on my planning for now. But if someone just wants to add
> it, and something isn't clear in the way kertex_M and kertex_T work
> together, just ask!

> My immediate aim is to provide a simple, sure distrib of TeX and al. that
> Donald E. Knuth could just install if needed.
>
> More work has to be done after to support utf8 and alien fonts. And to
> add also with some minimal changes (the support will be mainly in the
> dvi drivers) not only left to right, but right to left, top to bottom,
> bottom to top (?) "writing".

This last part is very exciting.  UTF-8, native fonts (quite the
reverse of "alien", really !) -- these are the things that make
XeTeX so useful, but XeTeX's future is uncertain, and whilst
some may argue that LuaTeX is that way of the future, others
are less sure.  A KerTeX version of XeTeX, with the possibility
of some further rationalisation and the possibility of further
development, would be a very exciting prospect indeed.

Philip Taylor


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