[XeTeX] Where download Vanilla XeTeX

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 6:27 PM, Jonathan Kew wrote:
> On 10 Aug 2008, at 4:40 PM, Neale Hirsh wrote:
>
>> Friends
>>
>> I need to download a copy of XeTeX/Mac that is _not_ embedded in a
>> 700 MB file. (The download is too expensive  for me and many other
>> people that I know.) Do you know where I can find a copy?
>
> Currently, I am not building binary packages, as most people get XeTeX
> included with a major TeX distribution, and maintaining an installer
> that can work with all the various distributions is a hassle. (What
> TeX setup are you using?)
>
> If you don't want to download a full TeX Live or MacTeX package --
> yes, I know it's huge -- you could build xetex from source (see the
> "XeTeX for Linux" page on scripts.sil.org for a pointer to source code).
>
> Alternatively, you could get the "BasicTeX" package from Dick Koch,
> which is about a 40MB download (see http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/).
> This includes XeTeX, as well as pdfTeX, LaTeX, etc. I'm not sure how
> recently it has been updated, though; it's possible that it has a
> slightly old version. I expect Dick will probably update it once TeX
> Live 2008 is finalized.
>
> Another possibility is the "minimal" distribution for ConTeXt, which
> also includes XeTeX. See http://wiki.contextgarden.net/
> ConTeXt_Minimals for information. Although this is intended for
> ConTeXt users, the actual binaries would be independent of the macro
> package, and you could presumably install them into another existing
> TeX distribution.

BasicTeX is not ready yet as far as I heard. I would suggest you to
build XeTeX yourself, but if you only need the binary (no TeX files;
or you can fetch TeX files from elsewhere), you can also fetch it from
http://minimals.contextgarden.net/current/bin/xetex/ (or using rsync;
make sure that you make it executable if you download it from web) as
Jonathan pointed out. That file is usually relatively up to date.

Mojca