Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 11:59:10 +0000 From: Jonathan Kew To: tug2005@tug.org Subject: Proposed presentation for TUG2005 TITLE: XeTeX, the Multilingual Lion: TeX meets Unicode and smart fonts AUTHOR: Jonathan Kew, SIL International ABSTRACT: This presentation will focus on XeTeX, a new system that extends TeX with direct support for modern OpenType and AAT fonts and the Unicode character set. This makes it possible to typeset almost any script and language with the same power and flexibility as TeX has traditionally offered in the 8-bit, simple-script world of European languages. Even languages such as Chinese, Arabic, or Indic scripts can be handled without the need for complex macro packages; the text "just works". As is well known, Professor Donald Knuth's TeX is a typesetting system with a wide user community, and a range of supporting packages and enhancements available for many types of publishing work. However, it dates back to the 1980s and is tightly wedded to 8-bit character data and custom-encoded fonts, making it difficult to configure TeX for many complex-script languages. One attempt to address this is the Omega project, with its extended versions of TeX font technologies, and the Omega Transformation Processes that can handle complex script behaviors. However, many potential users have found Omega complex and difficult to set up and use, and it appears to have found quite limited acceptance. XeTeX (currently available on Mac OS X, but there is interest in porting to other platforms as well) integrates the TeX formatting engine with technologies from both the host operating system (Apple Type Services, Text Encoding Converter) and auxiliary libraries (ICU, TECkit). Thus, it provides a system that combines the power, flexibility, and typographic excellence of TeX with modern international standards for character encoding and font rendering. Because XeTeX is integrated with the host operating system's font support, no complex configuration is required; any Unicode-compliant font installed on the user's computer is immediately available for typesetting. A wide range of fonts thus become available for use in TeX, and can be freely used within established macro packages such as LaTeX or ConTeXt.