[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

[Khaled Hosny]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 02:51:12PM -0400, William Adams wrote:
> 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.
> 
> I guess AAT/ATSUI is only used even when not using the xdv2pdf
> back-end to load fonts --- wouldn't one be able to compile it for Mac
> OS X using the settings / options for Linux so that while one wouldn't
> be able to easily access system fonts, one would be able to access
> fonts by file reference, or to use those fonts which are available to
> xquartz? 

ATSUI is used by the engine on mac to support AAT fonts, also
corresponding services are used for finding system fonts. It is possible
to disable all Mac specific code and build XeTeX as if it was another
Unix (I think MacPorts does this, on 64 bit at least), but that might
not be acceptable for every one.

Regards,
 Khaled