[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/7/30 William Adams <will.adams at frycomm.com>:
> On Jul 30, 2012, at 11:35 AM, Richard Koch wrote:
>
>> This worries me as well, since A LOT of people use XeTeX for production level
>> work. On the Macintosh, XeTeX uses a deprecated font library which Apple
>> never converted to 64 bits. The latest documentation from Apple says that this library
>> will be removed entirely in "a future system." That's scary for such a central
>> component of the TeX distribution.
>
If only Unicode support and access to system fonts are concerned, a
replacement already exists, namely luatex. The problem is that no
unicode rendering library is used, everything has to be implemented in
lua in the luaotfload library. For instance, support for Indic scripts
is missing. As Hans Hagen wrote me privately, he does not need it for
his project, nothing pushes him to implement it but it does not mean
that it won't happen but nobody knows when it might happen. Certainly
some tool is important, either XeTeX or luatex. The question is: is it
easier to find a volunteer for maintaining XeTeX or a volunteer who
will implement missing features for luaotfload and port important
packages as Polyglossia to luatex?

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