[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

[Jonathan Kew]

On 31/7/12 10:06, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I will step in and offer my 2 Euro cents worth.

...of misinformation, I'm afraid.

>
> First, we have to be careful not to mix oranges and apples.
>
> That is to say font formats ,  font feature sets, rendering engines
> and tex formats and tex engines. They are all different animals.
>
> Let us take ATSUI. Why has Apple abandon it? Well, I do not believe
> there are are any native ATT-fonts in the MacOS X any more.

What you happen to believe (or not) is irrelevant (and misleading). OS X 
ships with a bunch of AAT fonts. (There are also some available from 
third parties, though not large numbers.)

>
> Is Core Text a alternative? Not, actually.

Yes, actually. Core Text is the modern, supported replacement for ATSUI 
functionality.

> Core Text does have some
> support for ATSUI, but it is not 1 to 1.

Well, of course not; it's a different API. What would be the point of 
replacing an old, deprecated API that doesn't fit in with other modern 
APIs on the system with a 1-to-1 identical reimplementation? The 
replacement happened in order to modernize both the implementation and 
the interface.

Core Text doesn't have "support for ATSUI" in the sense of providing a 
set of ATSUI-clone APIs to applications, but it most certainly does have 
support for AAT fonts, which is the relevant issue here.