[XeTeX] [tex-live] Future state of XeTeX in TeXLive

[George N. White III]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 11:00 AM, William Adams <will.adams at frycomm.com> wrote:
> On Oct 28, 2011, at 9:00 AM, Dominik Wujastyk wrote:
>
>> Personally, I would not mind if XeTeX went into maintenance mode.  I like such stability.  It already has a great deal of functionality, probably enough to last me the rest of my writing career.  I do take Vafa's point, though, that if future OS platforms break XeTeX, it would be nice to have someone fix things up.
>
> Here in the U.S., it's almost time for United Way payroll deduction contributions to be allocated --- I've been donating to TUG for a couple of years, but would be willing to direct my TUG contribution to XeTeX maintenance if others would be similarly inclined.
>

Money can help, but unless very big piles of it are available, it is
more critical to generate a passion for good typography in people who
have the techical abilities needed for the work. I conjecture that the
number of people with both the passion and abilities needed is
currently empty.  Clearly there are many current xetex users with the
interest, and commercial software developers employ people to write
code to render texts using the MS and Apple API's, so there are also
people with the abilities.  Some may not be able to  contribute to
xetex by the terms of their employment, and some whose passion lies
with their employers products would not have considered contributing
to xetex.

Knuth has made many outstanding contributions, but not the least is to
raise typography to the first rank of problems in computing.   If you
want to create a pool of people with a passion for computer
typography, effort needs to go towards expanding awareness of Knuth's
work in typography and issues that remain.

To get things started, here is my list:

0.  Why is Tex still necessary?   My impression is that Knuth hoped to
see his work used in more creative ways than TeX distros.

1.  Knuth wanted to create beautiful books, yet many distinctly
unbeautiful books are still being published.   Lack of support for
font design size, too similar fonts used for text and maths (e.g.,
same glyph for letter "a" and variable "a") contribute to lack of
beauty.   I'm reminded of Knuth's early paper in which he analyzed
bugs in discarded decks of punched cards and found many examples of
errors resulting from failure to apply well-known principles taught in
into courses.

2.  Knuth created his own fonts and tools and these are still part of
a TeX system.   What problems are still present in the fonts and
support provided by modern GUI environments?

3.  Knuth was concerned with maths.   There are now many groups that
use TeX for documents that do not involved maths.  What do the
descendants of TeX have that other general purpose tools lack?

4.  Knuth was concerned primarily with typeset material.   Since then
there have been developments in linearization/flattened maths for
communications, and math markup for web (html) documents.

5.   Knuth built a compiler that is used in batch mode, but the
majority of documents are created using GUI tools.   What use cases
are better served by batch mode, and in what cases is TeX used by
default because of available GUI tools refuse to play.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia