[XeTeX] XeTeX 1.0 - request for comments

[Florian Grammel]

As a (Xe)LaTeX-only non-expert user I have some LaTeX-related wishes,  
that you might consider:

More documentation, or, not necessarily more, but more basic perhaps?  
Once I had understood, that XeLaTeX actually _was_ available (that  
took me a while...) and how it would make life so much easier, the  
Fontspec-documentation and the XeTeX-notes did answer nearly all  
questions.
But what about providing a simple document, stating that there is not  
just plain XeTeX, but also XeLaTeX, how to get it running and  
explaining the most basic commands how to choose a font and the like.
I think that many more LaTeX-users would love to get real Unicode- 
support in their documents and a way to avoid tedious font- 
installation for LaTeX, without caring too much for the fine-tuning.

Wouldn't it also be an idea that a release would have XeTeX-save  
versions of _all_ the maps, that babel comes with in the first place?
Thanks so much for the rapid fix of the Irish hyphenation map, btw!  
It wasn't even this urgent... :)

Another wish would be a macro that gives replacement patterns for  
ligatures like fi, fl,...(as long as the fonts don't include them)  
and perhaps also for the common shorthands like -- --- `` ''. As for  
the quotation marks it would really be very nice to be able to choose  
which real marks they will be expanded to. (Or is this yet available  
and I just don't know how to do it?)

And a minor issue, that I discovered recently:
\emph{Yyy yyyy yyyyyyy yy \emph{xxxx} yyyyyyyyy  yyyyyy yyy y.}
or
\textit{Yyy yyyy yyyyyyy yy \emph{xxxx} yyyyyyyyy  yyyyyy yyy y.}
is rendered with the ys in italics and the xes in regular when using  
LaTeX. XeLaTeX gives me italics all the way...




Kind regards,
Florian.





__________________________________________________________________

Florian Grammel

Fuglegårdsvænget 57, 1.th.
2820 Gentofte
Danmark