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

[Zdenek Wagner]

2011/10/28 Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:
>
>
> Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 13:19, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi
>>> Since Jonathan has no time any more for coding XeTeX, then what will be
>>> the
>>> state of XeTeX in TeX distributions such as TeXLive? will be XeTeX
>>> removed
>>> from TeXLive just like Aleph and Omega (in favour of LuaTeX) were removed
>>> from TeXLive?
>>
>> Omega was remove because it was buggy, unmaintained, but most
>> important of all: hardly usable. It took a genius to figure out how to
>> use it, while XeTeX is exactly the contrary. It simplifies everything
>> in comparison to pdfTeX.
>
> I think that last remark is grossly unfair, although probably
> not intentionally so.  XeTeX adds functionality that was non-
> existent in PdfTeX, but that hardly makes it simpler.  It
> also introduces a non-TeXlike syntax, particularly (perhaps
> only) in the extended \font primitive that could (IMHO)
> have been better thought out, particularly in the overloading
> of string quotes and the introduction of square brackets.
>
If I understand Mojca correctly, she compared XeTeX to Omega. Look
what was needed to typeset a Devanagari text in Omega. It was
necessary to plug a few OTP's. Some users somehow managed to do it but
it required non-TeX files. In XeTeX you have to define that the font
is in the Devanagari script and the rest is just TeX.

> Philip Taylor
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz