[XeTeX] [arXiv #128410] Re: XeLaTeX generated pdf metadata

[Zdenek Wagner]

2014-09-24 23:34 GMT+02:00 maxwell <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu>:
> On 2014-09-22 22:04, Axel E. Retif wrote:
>>
>> On 09/22/2014 08:42 PM, Mike Maxwell wrote:
>>
>>> I guess these jokers haven't heard of Unicode.  Are they stuck back in
>>> the 1990s?
>>
>>
>> Are you and Philip Taylor even aware that you're replying directly to
>> an arXiv administrator?
>>
>> I think arXiv and Cornell University are doing a great service to the
>> scientific community and public in general and deserve more respect.
>
>
> For the record, I was on the other side of this issue in the early 2000s,
> and was told I should move into the 21st century.  The person who told me
> that was right, and I was wrong.  Having been converted, I feel the need to
> proselytize; apologies, though, for coming across as brash.
>
> I'm a linguist, so I constantly deal with other scripts.  Unicode is
> essential for our work, and its use has been routine in linguistics and
> computational linguistics publications and data archiving for over a decade.
> All the language archiving sites I know about will accept *only* Unicode (or
> at the very least discourage non-Unicode submissions).
>
A few years ago I was asked by editors of a linguistics journal to
make a LaTeX template for them. They told me that many authors use
Arabic and Chinese and therefore they decided to use XeLaTeX only.
However, they wanted also an old-style LaTeX template for those
authors who do not need such scripts and do not wish to install XeTeX
and the document should be easily convertible from old-style LaTeX to
XeLaTeX. And the authors are allowed to use free fonts only. It was
easy to develop such a template.

> So no, I don't understand why an archiving service would not allow
> Unicode-encoded papers, even if it does require xelatex.  (For the record, I
> think the font is a red herring, since afaik the font license issue comes up
> regardless of whether you're using latex or xelatex.)
>
Even worse, if you need a non-latin script, you only have a Unicode
OpenType font and are forced to use old-style LaTeX, you have to
convert the font but most often such a conversion is explicitely
prohibited by the font license.

>    Mike Maxwell
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>  http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex



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