[XeTeX] Bruno V on Mac OS X TeX Mailing list

[Will Robertson]

On 12/11/2006, at 8:33 , Ross Moore wrote:

> We should not release anything until we can merge both yours
> and my work, into a package that has properly worked out how
> to handle maths, for:
>    LaTeX typesetting with different fonts;
>    Bookmarks;
>    Unicode strings in other parts of PDF ;
>    different kinds of driver support.
>
> Now I have plenty of sample materials for testing such features,
> and will have thousands more next year, where I'll be wanting to use
> this kind of feature.

Hi Ross,

You can grab unimath from the SVN repository:
   <http://scripts.sil.org/svn-public/xetex/TRUNK/texmf/source/ 
xelatex/unimath/>
(the new name is because "xmaths" isn't specific enough; it could  
just as well be a new set of competing macros to amsmath;  
furthermore, the LaTeX3 project use "x" prefices in their packages  
and I wanted to prevent any sort of confusion there.)

The pdf there should describe a little more about what I've been done  
so far. Run latex on the dtx to get the sty; it'll bomb out when it  
realises you need xelatex, but not before the embedded ins file has  
extracted the files it needs to.

Anyway, unimaths at present does two things:
  - can select glyphs from different fonts for different maths  
characters.
    i.e., \forall and \alpha can be from different fonts.
  - provides a mapping between ascii roman and greek letters to their  
mathematical counterparts.
    (not using font mappings yet, maybe not ever.)
  - provides the actual unicode maths font encoding so all this is  
done automatically.

What's missing:
  - big operators, delimiters, radicals support. this is coming with  
a pre-release version of XeTeX.
  - better selection of maths character ranges, based on unicode  
subsets and other properties.
  - hope to make some progress on these today.

What I'm unsure about:
  - I think all of the old \mathbf, \mathsf, etc. commands are going  
to be obsolete. They could be emulated, and probably should be for  
backwards compatibility, but they don't really make sense any more.  
In fact, I'm sure they ever did. People have been using \mathbf{} for  
ages to denote things like vectors, but the glyphs used then were  
generally inappropriate. Instead, unimaths defines command names for  
individual glyphs like \bfalpha, \bfscrA, \bfitsansz, \etc.

Perhaps the best way to collaborate, Ross, would be through the XeTeX  
svn repository. Jonathan can provide you with access to the texmf  
tree, and we can then ensure we're keeping up-to-date with each other  
as changes are made.

Cheers,
Will
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