[XeTeX] XeTeX 0.4 available

[Hans Hagen]

At 18:32 21/04/2004, Jonathan Kew wrote:

A couple of questions (for you to think about in the morning; others are of 
course welcome to offer opinions as well!):

>* Should there also be cropping options on \picfile? I've always done 
>stuff like that outside of TeX, but I remember someone mentioning it; does 
>\includegraphics have cropping facilities? If so, what would be a logical 
>approach to extending \picfile: four new keywords - cropleft, cropright, 
>croptop, cropbottom? How should this interact with scaling and rotation?

normally that (scaling, rotating, cropping, mirroring, etc) are handled 
indepdent of the graphics, think of a graphic being part of a box with 
other content and the whole being scaled; if one can crop text, one can 
also crop an image so there is no real need for that feature

(one can write postscript specials that provide cropping; or in 
pdftex/dvipdfmx pdf literals)

>* How badly do people want \special{x:pagecolor=XXXXXX} or similar? To 
>implement this, I really need to know the page color at the very beginning 
>of the page, so I can paint it first--which will mean scanning the page 
>for occurrences of this \special before starting to image anything. That 
>will have a small but perhaps noticeable cost.

hm, no real need, i.e. what is a page; also macro packages can handle that 
rather well; keep in mind that when only one system provides that, and when 
it's not part of the tex concept, that it will not really be used; normally 
support for that is supported by a macro package kernel, and that kernel 
operates independent of features of drivers;  forinstance, when a macro 
package keeps track of such things, support for your driver means that one 
has to adapt quite a lot (and in doing that in the proper way, i.e. hooks, 
configurable, etc etc, is not worth the effort when it is already possible 
by other means. So ... i'd say ... give it low priority.

Also, what is page color: the whole page? the text area? .. tex does not 
have such concepts, macropackages do -)

Hans