Re: [XeTeX] how do I embed fonts into a a xelatex generated pdf?
On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 6:13 PM, Adam Russell wrote: Still one problem remains. You may include images created by tools as gnuplot or inkscape that insert texts in Helvetica but do not embed the font. It will need some tweaking depending on the tool. Ah! That is exactly my problem I now realize. My paper in and of itself does not use Helvetica but I am using gnuplot to generate figures. My suggestion would be to use a modern latex*** terminal instead of pdf. That way the fonts in plots will also match the fonts used in your paper and you will be able to typeset formulas, subscripts etc. *** - Not set term latex, but a different latex-based one. My favourite would be set term tikz latex (or context, but you probably don't use ConTeXt :). You can also use standalone option and process the plot separately from paper. There are some other terminals like epslatex etc., but tikz seems to be like the best choice to me. Mojca -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
Hi Kiddies, I am getting a good laugh with this thread! Yes, there are caveats to the arguments. The important thing is that there is someone/ a team that is willing to improve the behavior of Babel and maybe teaching it some new tricks while not breaking it! The benefits may only be for a few of interest. The most important thing is that Babe lis not broken. Let's just sit back and is what happens! regards Keith. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
Is there a mailing list/development repository for babel? -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
Do you want to say that Leslie Lamport lied when stating that LaTeX (even v. 2.09) is international? Do you want to say that the babel Many years ago a friend of mine prepared his MSc thesis using nroff and the text he was setting was Greek. Does this mean that people should maintain nroff? Does this mean that people should continue using nroff? As far it regards, Lamport I don't think he created LaTeX for people who prepare documents in languages other than English. The same applies to TeX itself. Knuth just added 8-bit support to enable support for languages that use the Latin alphabet. authors used to lie us? Do you want to say that LaTeX cannot be used for non-English languages? Well, I used it to typeset Czech, Russian The correct term is for languages that do not use the Latin alphabet and although I am one of these authors, I do say that it is a mistake to update babel. This package is history and no one should update it. It should remain there only for those poor souls who can't or don't want to upgrade their old source files. German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Classical Greek, Modern Greek, French, Plattdeutsh, Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Try to write Greek with babel and with XeTeX: babal is just pain in @$$ whilst XeLaTeX simply rocks! Do you understand now what I am saying? time by converting various symbols to macros. But do not tell me that LaTeX is unsuitable for multilingual processing because it is not true. I hope that the list of languages given above is large enough. It is unsuitable because it was not designed to be so! Typesetting Greek demands Greek fonts encoded in some stupid and archaic encoding and the use of some transliteration encoding files. If you call this suitable, then I simply rest my case! Otherwise, just admit that TeX is unsuitable for multilingual typesetting and babel should remain there for reasons of backwards compatibility and that's all. A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] how do I embed fonts into a a xelatex generated pdf?
2012/5/4 Wilfred van Rooijen wvanrooi...@yahoo.com: Hello, Always be careful with pdf2ps. If one converts PS to PDF, information is lost - this is one of the reasons that the PDF file is usually smaller in size than the PS file. So it is technically not always possible to perfectly reconstruct a PS from a PDF. So be careful, especially if the material is to be printed professionally. Some tips and tricks that I find useful: - EPS has a built-in JPEG support. If you use the program jepg2ps, the resulting EPS will be only marginally larger than the original JPEG file. - Convert EPS to PDF with ps2pdf - Use pdfcrop to cut off irrelevant whitespace from a PDF - If you want to use matlab figures (or from a similar software), then saving the output as PS gives you some more control if you want to make a PDF - but at the expense of more work for you. Note that scilab (an open-source and free matlab-like software) has very poor support for EPS and PDF, but it is still workable. - Use pdfpages.sty to manipulate external PDFs directly into your latex document pdfpages operates on whole pages, for inclusion of images in PDF \includegraphics from the graphicx packes is more appropriate. You can even include a selected page from a multipage PDF by specifying tha page option, the default for \includegraphics is page=1. - Use pdftk if you want to do fancy things with a PDF file (merging, splitting, nup printing, etc) Cheers, Wilfred From: Adam Russell aruss...@cs.uml.edu To: xetex@tug.org Sent: Friday, 4 May 2012, 3:02 Subject: Re: [XeTeX] how do I embed fonts into a a xelatex generated pdf? On 5/3/12 1:10 PM, xetex-requ...@tug.org wrote: Date: Thu, 3 May 2012 11:08:00 +0200 From: Zdenek Wagnerzdenek.wag...@gmail.com To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platformsxetex@tug.org Subject: Re: [XeTeX] how do I embed fonts into a a xelatex generated pdf? Message-ID: cac1phybau4bh1tl+yp+expohjumnq1ms56gh9map-lzdygz...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-2 Short answer: you have to buy Helvetica. Long answer: There are basic 15 PS fonts and basic 35 PDF fonts that must be according to the specification available everywhere. However, this requirement is broken even in Adobe products (the author of the specification) and it is quite common to see different versions of Times and Helvetica with different metrics (it cost me some money and damaged output to discover this crucial problem). It is therefore good (and required by DTP studios and printer houses) to embed all fonts. These 35 basic fonts are commercial and thus cannot be distributed with TeX. There are free replacements (from URW and other vendors). Now you have two options: 1. Embed the replacement fonts possibly losing quality 2. Do not embed the font and hope that the user has either the commercial font or a replacement font that will not be worse. Of course option 1 is better unless you know that the user has the commercial font with exactly the same metrics as you. You have to look into the manual of your TeX distribution how to instruct it to embed all fonts (it is done by updmap-sys in TeX Live). If you want to have fonts with better quality, you can consider using TeX Gyre Heros instead of Helvetica. Still one problem remains. You may include images created by tools as gnuplot or inkscape that insert texts in Helvetica but do not embed the font. It will need some tweaking depending on the tool. Ah! That is exactly my problem I now realize. My paper in and of itself does not use Helvetica but I am using gnuplot to generate figures. So, I guess I am going with (2). The use of Helvetica in the figures is so small that hopefully any difference will be so small as to be undetectable. I am willing to bet that Helvetica is a common enough font and gnuplot is a common enough tool that this shouldn't be an issue. We'll see... And also, just for the record, I found these directions on embedding fonts to be very clear: http://confsys.encs.concordia.ca/public_files/embeded_fonts.php Thank you very much for the help! One final thing. I just discovered a clever workaround. For the entire document run pdf2ps pdf2ps document.pdf and the run this command on the ps file ps2pdf14 -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress document.ps This seems to work for embedding the fonts without having to regenerate anything! -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -- Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 12:33:48AM -0700, Apostolos Syropoulos wrote: Try to write Greek with babel and with XeTeX: babal is just pain in @$$ whilst XeLaTeX simply rocks! Do you understand now what I am saying? You are comparing apples and oranges here. -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
Try to write Greek with babel and with XeTeX: babal is just pain in @$$ whilst XeLaTeX simply rocks! Do you understand now what I am saying? You are comparing apples and oranges here. You think so? OK, I can live with this kind of critique. A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com: German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Classical Greek, Modern Greek, French, Plattdeutsh, Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Try to write Greek with babel and with XeTeX: babal is just pain in @$$ whilst XeLaTeX simply rocks! Do you understand now what I am saying? It is not a big difference for me. I know Greek alphabet because it is used in math but such knowledge is not sufficient to type the Greek text as quickly as I can do int in languages that I know at least a little (Czech, Slovak, Polish, English, Danish, Norwegian, Hindi). When typesetting the text in Greek I got it from its author written in the Symbol font and monotoniko accents marked with a pencil on a printout. I wrote a simple program to convert it to transliteration for use with LaTeX. The author of the text was ill, so he sent a student to me to do proof-reading. The student saw TeX for the first time in her life, yet she was able to understand the transliteration within a few seconds and type anything that was necessary to correct. Thus it seems that it is not that clumsy. At that time there was no unicode support in text editors, so there was no other option. A few year ago I had to insert one sentence from the New Testament. It can be found on the web. I decided to install the Athena font and use XeLaTeX so tha I can simply copypaste the sentence from the web to gvim. time by converting various symbols to macros. But do not tell me that LaTeX is unsuitable for multilingual processing because it is not true. I hope that the list of languages given above is large enough. It is unsuitable because it was not designed to be so! Typesetting Greek demands Greek fonts encoded in some stupid and archaic encoding and the use of some transliteration encoding files. If you call this suitable, then I simply rest my case! Otherwise, just admit that TeX is unsuitable for multilingual typesetting and babel should remain there for reasons of backwards compatibility and that's all. All the above listed languages were used in a single book and the DVI was created by a single LaTeX run. It was not easy to combine everything will all encodings and be sure that active characters will not cause problems, but it was not that difficult. The biggest problem was to find all characters for Mongolian and Ewe, because at that time they were not available in the fonts. I had to create them. Now XeTeX solves a lot of problems, active characters and weird macros are not needed. Yet there are users in India who prefer to use Velthuis Devanagari + old LaTeX + Babel. The basic definitions can be almost shared between Babel and Polyglossia. I already have the Babel module for Hindi, so I do not see any reaso why to stop its supports if they are still users who demand it. I am happy that there is a person to whom I can send my work and have it added to the official version of Babel. A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 03:19:16AM -0700, Apostolos Syropoulos wrote: Try to write Greek with babel and with XeTeX: babal is just pain in @$$ whilst XeLaTeX simply rocks! Do you understand now what I am saying? You are comparing apples and oranges here. You think so? OK, I can live with this kind of critique. Well, when you compare a LaTeX package to a TeX engine you either don’t know what you are talking about or deliberately committing a logical fallacy, pick your choice. Regards, Khaled -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
Well, when you compare a LaTeX package to a TeX engine you either don’t know what you are talking about or deliberately committing a logical fallacy, pick your choice. Do you think I don't know the difference between a typesetting engine and a package? When I talk about babel I mean obviously LaTeX and the package and when I talk about XeTeX I obviously mean XeLaTeX and some package. A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 06:33:03AM -0700, Apostolos Syropoulos wrote: Well, when you compare a LaTeX package to a TeX engine you either don’t know what you are talking about or deliberately committing a logical fallacy, pick your choice. Do you think I don't know the difference between a typesetting engine and a package? When I talk about babel I mean obviously LaTeX and the package and when I talk about XeTeX I obviously mean XeLaTeX and some package. No, that is not obvious to me given that nothing inherent in Babel that prevents it from working with (and taking advantage of) new engines, just like LaTeX does (the so called XeLaTeX is just the plain old LaTeX with few trivial adaptations for XeTeX, it is not like we are talking about a completely new format here). If you think LaTeX is too archaic and should be put in museum (I do), that is a different story. Regards, Khaled -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
If you think LaTeX is too archaic and should be put in museum (I do), that is a different story. At least we agree to something! In addition, I feel that we need to get rid of many other programs, macro-packages, etc. For example, there is absolutely no reason to maintain XDVI. A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
Although I don't use babel nowadays, I would like to thank to Javier Bezos his effort and time in maintaining and improving it. That's one of the best things of the *TeX world, that you have options to choose what it is better for you. Perhaps XeTeX is great for some of us today; perhaps tomorrow again LaTeX+babel, LuaTeX or whatever. Keith J Schultz said it better, but I agree with him. Let's see what Javier and others can do. My congrats again, Javier. --- Juan Francisco Fraile Vicente --- 2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com Well, when you compare a LaTeX package to a TeX engine you either don’t know what you are talking about or deliberately committing a logical fallacy, pick your choice. Do you think I don't know the difference between a typesetting engine and a package? When I talk about babel I mean obviously LaTeX and the package and when I talk about XeTeX I obviously mean XeLaTeX and some package. A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
I'm not going to get involved in the polemics of this thread (which, as has been well pointed out, has tended towards the puerile), but I am a user of (so-called plain) XeTeX, so far without any strong incentive to move over to a LaTeX flavour of the program, and I do appreciate having the hyphenation algorithms immediately accessible so that I just need to type \latin, \greek, \russian, \irish or whatever to ensure good word-breaks (I despair of finding an English one which suits my preference for the old Hart's Rules conventions, so I have a rather gigantic exception \hyphenation list, which one day will no doubt hit the program's maximum). In the early days of my transfer to XeTeX, I think someone said that these algorithms were supplied to XeTeX by Babel, so I very much hope that it does continue to be a feature of plain XeTeX at least, and don't see why anyone would want to prevent a member of the TeX community from enhancing and maintaining it if that's how the person wants to spend his time. XeLaTeX users have a choice of alternatives, and polyglossia is clearly of enormous use in some contexts - I would happily learn it if a project came my way that would be difficult to realize without it. But until then, I'm very happy with what's on offer in XeTeX, and I deplore the suggestion that modules should be abandoned, banned, etc. - especially when couched in the unpleasant terms that I've been reading in these emails. John - Original Message - From: Juan Francisco Fraile Vicente To: Apostolos Syropoulos ; Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms Sent: 04 May 2012 15:19 Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Babel Although I don't use babel nowadays, I would like to thank to Javier Bezos his effort and time in maintaining and improving it. That's one of the best things of the *TeX world, that you have options to choose what it is better for you. Perhaps XeTeX is great for some of us today; perhaps tomorrow again LaTeX+babel, LuaTeX or whatever. Keith J Schultz said it better, but I agree with him. Let's see what Javier and others can do. My congrats again, Javier. --- Juan Francisco Fraile Vicente --- 2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com Well, when you compare a LaTeX package to a TeX engine you either don’t know what you are talking about or deliberately committing a logical fallacy, pick your choice. Do you think I don't know the difference between a typesetting engine and a package? When I talk about babel I mean obviously LaTeX and the package and when I talk about XeTeX I obviously mean XeLaTeX and some package. A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -- -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
2012/5/4 John Was john@ntlworld.com: I'm not going to get involved in the polemics of this thread (which, as has been well pointed out, has tended towards the puerile), but I am a user of (so-called plain) XeTeX, so far without any strong incentive to move over to a LaTeX flavour of the program, and I do appreciate having the hyphenation algorithms immediately accessible so that I just need to type \latin, \greek, \russian, \irish or whatever to ensure good word-breaks (I despair of finding an English one which suits my preference for the old Hart's Rules conventions, so I have a rather gigantic exception \hyphenation list, which one day will no doubt hit the program's maximum). In the early days of my transfer to XeTeX, I think someone said that these algorithms were supplied to XeTeX by Babel, so I very much hope that it does continue to be a feature of plain XeTeX at least, and don't see why anyone would want to prevent a member of the TeX community from enhancing and maintaining it if that's how the person wants to spend his time. XeLaTeX users have a choice of alternatives, and polyglossia is clearly of enormous use in some contexts - I would happily learn it if a project came my way that would be difficult to realize without it. But until then, I'm very happy with what's on offer in XeTeX, and I deplore the suggestion that modules should be abandoned, banned, etc. - especially when couched in the unpleasant terms that I've been reading in these emails. Hyphenation algorithm is the integral part of the TeX engine. If you want to switch to another language, you have to assign a proper value to the \language register, set values of \lefthyphenmin and \righthyphenmin and if non-english characters are set on the old (La)TeX, you should also set \catcote, \lccode and \uccode of these characters. Babel came with user friendly interface that allowed to specify the language using a macro that is portable across installations (US English is always \language 0 but if I install Czech, Slovak and Hindi, in my TeX Hindi will be \language 3 while if other person has Hindi, Sanskrit and Urdu, Hindi will be \language 1 but \hindi will do the same on both computers). Polyglossia is based upon the same idea so that both packages can coexist in the same TeX distributions, users may use both in XeLaTeX documents and the syntax is very similar so that conversion of babel-based documents to polyglossia-based ones is quite easy. What is not easy is emulation of microtypographical features in XeTeX. Such emulation was described before pdfTeX existed and PK fonts were used. It was based upon a perl script that analysed the log file, then decided which lines should be typeset with expanded or compressed fonts, modified the tfm files and the source files, and if the paragraphs were optimized, created the expanded and compressed fonts. It would be slightly easier in XeTeX because font expansion can be given as a option in \fontspec (if I remember the manual well) but still it is not as easy as in pdftex. If you need anything else than US English and you consider Babel dead and unusable, you can only use XeLaTeX+Polyglossia, you cannot even use Luatex. Lua as a scripting languages offers to solve certain problems in a better and easier way than it is done in nowadays Babel, bu there is a question: should it be done in Babel, or in Polyglossia? I think there is only one person who has the right to vote: the person who volunteers to do it. John - Original Message - From: Juan Francisco Fraile Vicente To: Apostolos Syropoulos ; Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms Sent: 04 May 2012 15:19 Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Babel Although I don't use babel nowadays, I would like to thank to Javier Bezos his effort and time in maintaining and improving it. That's one of the best things of the *TeX world, that you have options to choose what it is better for you. Perhaps XeTeX is great for some of us today; perhaps tomorrow again LaTeX+babel, LuaTeX or whatever. Keith J Schultz said it better, but I agree with him. Let's see what Javier and others can do. My congrats again, Javier. --- Juan Francisco Fraile Vicente --- 2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com Well, when you compare a LaTeX package to a TeX engine you either don't know what you are talking about or deliberately committing a logical fallacy, pick your choice. Do you think I don't know the difference between a typesetting engine and a package? When I talk about babel I mean obviously LaTeX and the package and when I talk about XeTeX I obviously mean XeLaTeX and some package. A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
If you think LaTeX is too archaic and should be put in museum (I do), that is a different story. At least we agree to something! In addition, I feel that we need to get rid of many other programs, macro-packages, etc. For example, there is absolutely no reason to maintain XDVI. A.S. Telling other people what they should maintain and what they *must* abandon feels very arrogant. Why should a certain A.S. decide what is worth the effort and what is not? Jan Foniok -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
Well that gives me a lot more technical information than I had before, but
as an end user I don't think I need to manipulate things too much. To use
my \latin macro, for example, all I have done is add a line to the file
header:
\def\latin{\uselanguage{latin}\righthyphenmin=3}
And so on for other languages. (Never US English though - perisca il
pensiero!)
I haven't got involved in microtypographical features and don't *think* I
ever require them (I'm open to correction!). They seem to involve dynamic
expansion and compression of a font within the body of a paragraph (is that
right?) without manual intervention by the user. Since I was brought up in
a hot-metal typographical tradition, I absorbed with my mother's milk the
notion that a font was an artistic creation that shouldn't be interfered
with, so this all looks very suspicious to me, at least in the kind of work
that I do (I'm sure it has its uses). That said, I can remember compositors
getting out a knife to cut the right-hand edge off a Van Dyck italic V or W
if it happened to fall at the end of a line and created a crooked effect;
these highly talented gentlemen would also keep a stock of emtpy cigarette
boxes and even the foil packaging of the cigarettes so that the right-hand
column of two-column footnotes could always be feathered to end up at the
bottom of the page depth even if the column was naturally a line shorter
than its left-hand neighbour...
I see I've fallen into a nostalgic reverie...
John
- Original Message -
From: Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wag...@gmail.com
To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms xetex@tug.org
Sent: 04 May 2012 16:11
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Babel
2012/5/4 John Was john@ntlworld.com:
I'm not going to get involved in the polemics of this thread (which, as
has
been well pointed out, has tended towards the puerile), but I am a user of
(so-called plain) XeTeX, so far without any strong incentive to move over
to
a LaTeX flavour of the program, and I do appreciate having the hyphenation
algorithms immediately accessible so that I just need to type \latin,
\greek, \russian, \irish or whatever to ensure good word-breaks (I despair
of finding an English one which suits my preference for the old Hart's
Rules
conventions, so I have a rather gigantic exception \hyphenation list,
which
one day will no doubt hit the program's maximum). In the early days of my
transfer to XeTeX, I think someone said that these algorithms were
supplied
to XeTeX by Babel, so I very much hope that it does continue to be a
feature
of plain XeTeX at least, and don't see why anyone would want to prevent a
member of the TeX community from enhancing and maintaining it if that's
how
the person wants to spend his time. XeLaTeX users have a choice of
alternatives, and polyglossia is clearly of enormous use in some
contexts -
I would happily learn it if a project came my way that would be difficult
to
realize without it. But until then, I'm very happy with what's on offer
in
XeTeX, and I deplore the suggestion that modules should be abandoned,
banned, etc. - especially when couched in the unpleasant terms that I've
been reading in these emails.
Hyphenation algorithm is the integral part of the TeX engine. If you
want to switch to another language, you have to assign a proper value
to the \language register, set values of \lefthyphenmin and
\righthyphenmin and if non-english characters are set on the old
(La)TeX, you should also set \catcote, \lccode and \uccode of these
characters. Babel came with user friendly interface that allowed to
specify the language using a macro that is portable across
installations (US English is always \language 0 but if I install
Czech, Slovak and Hindi, in my TeX Hindi will be \language 3 while if
other person has Hindi, Sanskrit and Urdu, Hindi will be \language 1
but \hindi will do the same on both computers). Polyglossia is based
upon the same idea so that both packages can coexist in the same TeX
distributions, users may use both in XeLaTeX documents and the syntax
is very similar so that conversion of babel-based documents to
polyglossia-based ones is quite easy. What is not easy is emulation of
microtypographical features in XeTeX. Such emulation was described
before pdfTeX existed and PK fonts were used. It was based upon a perl
script that analysed the log file, then decided which lines should be
typeset with expanded or compressed fonts, modified the tfm files and
the source files, and if the paragraphs were optimized, created the
expanded and compressed fonts. It would be slightly easier in XeTeX
because font expansion can be given as a option in \fontspec (if I
remember the manual well) but still it is not as easy as in pdftex.
If you need anything else than US English and you consider Babel dead
and unusable, you can only use XeLaTeX+Polyglossia, you cannot even
use Luatex. Lua as a scripting languages offers to solve certain
problems in
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
Telling other people what they should maintain and what they *must* abandon feels very arrogant. Why should a certain A.S. decide what is worth the effort and what is not? Arrogant in what way? Have you ever tried to compile the TeX tree? In many cases people have to invent stupid patches just to support an almost useless program in a modern computing environment. As about the rest, I will not make any comment. A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
2012/5/4 John Was john@ntlworld.com:
Well that gives me a lot more technical information than I had before, but
as an end user I don't think I need to manipulate things too much. To use
my \latin macro, for example, all I have done is add a line to the file
header:
\def\latin{\uselanguage{latin}\righthyphenmin=3}
And so on for other languages. (Never US English though - perisca il
pensiero!)
I haven't got involved in microtypographical features and don't *think* I
ever require them (I'm open to correction!). They seem to involve dynamic
expansion and compression of a font within the body of a paragraph (is that
right?) without manual intervention by the user. Since I was brought up in
a hot-metal typographical tradition, I absorbed with my mother's milk the
notion that a font was an artistic creation that shouldn't be interfered
with, so this all looks very suspicious to me, at least in the kind of work
that I do (I'm sure it has its uses). That said, I can remember compositors
getting out a knife to cut the right-hand edge off a Van Dyck italic V or W
if it happened to fall at the end of a line and created a crooked effect;
these highly talented gentlemen would also keep a stock of emtpy cigarette
boxes and even the foil packaging of the cigarettes so that the right-hand
column of two-column footnotes could always be feathered to end up at the
bottom of the page depth even if the column was naturally a line shorter
than its left-hand neighbour...
I see I've fallen into a nostalgic reverie...
Even Gutenberg had some alternate glyphs with different width, for
instance m. Of course, most text do not need automatic
compression/expansion, maybe you will never need it in your life but
there are cases where it is useful.
John
- Original Message - From: Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wag...@gmail.com
To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms xetex@tug.org
Sent: 04 May 2012 16:11
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Babel
2012/5/4 John Was john@ntlworld.com:
I'm not going to get involved in the polemics of this thread (which, as
has
been well pointed out, has tended towards the puerile), but I am a user of
(so-called plain) XeTeX, so far without any strong incentive to move over
to
a LaTeX flavour of the program, and I do appreciate having the hyphenation
algorithms immediately accessible so that I just need to type \latin,
\greek, \russian, \irish or whatever to ensure good word-breaks (I despair
of finding an English one which suits my preference for the old Hart's
Rules
conventions, so I have a rather gigantic exception \hyphenation list,
which
one day will no doubt hit the program's maximum). In the early days of my
transfer to XeTeX, I think someone said that these algorithms were
supplied
to XeTeX by Babel, so I very much hope that it does continue to be a
feature
of plain XeTeX at least, and don't see why anyone would want to prevent a
member of the TeX community from enhancing and maintaining it if that's
how
the person wants to spend his time. XeLaTeX users have a choice of
alternatives, and polyglossia is clearly of enormous use in some contexts
-
I would happily learn it if a project came my way that would be difficult
to
realize without it. But until then, I'm very happy with what's on offer
in
XeTeX, and I deplore the suggestion that modules should be abandoned,
banned, etc. - especially when couched in the unpleasant terms that I've
been reading in these emails.
Hyphenation algorithm is the integral part of the TeX engine. If you
want to switch to another language, you have to assign a proper value
to the \language register, set values of \lefthyphenmin and
\righthyphenmin and if non-english characters are set on the old
(La)TeX, you should also set \catcote, \lccode and \uccode of these
characters. Babel came with user friendly interface that allowed to
specify the language using a macro that is portable across
installations (US English is always \language 0 but if I install
Czech, Slovak and Hindi, in my TeX Hindi will be \language 3 while if
other person has Hindi, Sanskrit and Urdu, Hindi will be \language 1
but \hindi will do the same on both computers). Polyglossia is based
upon the same idea so that both packages can coexist in the same TeX
distributions, users may use both in XeLaTeX documents and the syntax
is very similar so that conversion of babel-based documents to
polyglossia-based ones is quite easy. What is not easy is emulation of
microtypographical features in XeTeX. Such emulation was described
before pdfTeX existed and PK fonts were used. It was based upon a perl
script that analysed the log file, then decided which lines should be
typeset with expanded or compressed fonts, modified the tfm files and
the source files, and if the paragraphs were optimized, created the
expanded and compressed fonts. It would be slightly easier in XeTeX
because font expansion can be given as a
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com: Telling other people what they should maintain and what they *must* abandon feels very arrogant. Why should a certain A.S. decide what is worth the effort and what is not? Arrogant in what way? Have you ever tried to compile the TeX tree? In many cases people have to invent stupid patches just to support an almost Don't you feel yourself in a loop? If they patch it, they apparently want to use it and if they want to use it, it is not useless for them because if it were useless, they would not use it and thus they would have no reason to patch it. useless program in a modern computing environment. As about the rest, I will not make any comment. If the modern computer environment does not offer important features that were implemented in the old environment decades and still work, than (at least for me) it is natural to use the old environment. A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -- Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
El 04/05/2012 9:24, Vafa Khalighi escribió: Is there a mailing list/development repository for babel? Sure. The repository is on: http://www.latex-project.org/svnroot/latex2e-public/required/babel/ Until now, there are only changes in the test files. As to the mailing list, I'm not sure. There is the latex-l list, but it's intended mainly for LaTeX3, and babel is a LaTeX2e (and Plain) thing, but after cleaning up babel there will be very likely further work on a new multilingual core for LaTeX3, and I presume discussing babel will be ok. Remember what I said in my first post -- as far as babel is concerned, the goal is mainly to fix bugs, to make babel compatible with XeTeX and LuaTeX (and just that) and perhaps to add a few minor features, that's all, because a new core is clearly necessary. Work on the latter, however, will start later and not right now -- understanding better the problems in babel will help in the development of the new core. Javier -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
I think it's arrogant in the strict sense that you arrogate to yourself the right to tell others what tasks they should or should not be engaging in, and you characterize the activity of those persisting in the tasks you would like to prohibit as 'stupid' (as in your most recent contribution). I know that it was naive of the generation before mine to think that a successfully fought world war would put an end to this kind of controlling attitude, which is regrettably as prevalent today as it ever was, but I would have hoped to avoid encountering it in a TeX forum! John - Original Message - From: Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms xetex@tug.org Sent: 04 May 2012 16:35 Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Babel Telling other people what they should maintain and what they *must* abandon feels very arrogant. Why should a certain A.S. decide what is worth the effort and what is not? Arrogant in what way? Have you ever tried to compile the TeX tree? In many cases people have to invent stupid patches just to support an almost useless program in a modern computing environment. As about the rest, I will not make any comment. A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
On 04/05/2012 17:48, Javier Bezos wrote: As to the mailing list, I'm not sure. There is the latex-l list, but it's intended mainly for LaTeX3, and babel is a LaTeX2e (and Plain) thing, but after cleaning up babel there will be very likely further work on a new multilingual core for LaTeX3, and I presume discussing babel will be ok. My understanding is that LaTeX-L is for 'LaTeX core' discussion, which covers LaTeX2e, LaTeX3, 'required', 'tools', etc. The fact that LaTeX2e is not changing means that there not much to say, but there is occasionally something. As you say, babel material would be useful for thinking about the issues for LaTeX3 too. -- Joseph Wright -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
Don't you feel yourself in a loop? If they patch it, they apparently want to use it and if they want to use it, it is not useless for them because if it were useless, they would not use it and thus they would have no reason to patch it. No! The problem is that people should start saying that certain parts of the old TeX world are irrelevant and so they should not be part of any TeX distribution. For example, on a set of recently compiled binaries I see the following: apostolo@nadya ./tex This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2012/dev) **^D ! End of file on the terminal... why? apostolo@nadya ./pdftex This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012/dev) restricted \write18 enabled. **^C The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files. If the modern computer environment does not offer important features that were implemented in the old environment decades and still work, than (at least for me) it is natural to use the old environment. That is called conservatism, that is, something against progress... A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
I think it's arrogant in the strict sense that you arrogate to yourself the right to tell others what tasks they should or should not be engaging in, and you characterize the activity of those persisting in the tasks you would like to prohibit as 'stupid' (as in your most recent contribution). I know that it was naive of the generation before mine to think that a successfully fought world war would put an end to this kind of controlling attitude, which is ^ Well I think you have crossed the line! I think it makes no sense to argue with you. A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com: No! The problem is that people should start saying that certain parts of the old TeX world are irrelevant and so they should not be part of any TeX distribution. For example, on a set of recently compiled You don't understand the idea of TeX/LaTeX: A stable system that can be used ad eternam. The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can Because DEK uses his TeX, not Thanh's pdfTeX. do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files. These are _not_ useless for a certain someone in Stanford. Best Martin -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
On May 4, 2012, at 1:26 PM, Apostolos Syropoulos wrote: Don't you feel yourself in a loop? If they patch it, they apparently want to use it and if they want to use it, it is not useless for them because if it were useless, they would not use it and thus they would have no reason to patch it. No! The problem is that people should start saying that certain parts of the old TeX world are irrelevant and so they should not be part of any TeX distribution. For example, on a set of recently compiled binaries I see the following: apostolo@nadya ./tex This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2012/dev) **^D ! End of file on the terminal... why? apostolo@nadya ./pdftex This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012/dev) restricted \write18 enabled. **^C The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files. Howdy, I hesitate jumping into this discussion but one reason to retain tex-dvi-ps-pdf is that pdftex can't include eps figures by default. That said, recent versions of pdftex using the graphicx package can use epstopdf (which uses Ghostscript?) to convert eps-pdf on the fly unless you have your system set to ``paranoid'' mode. Good Luck, Herb Schulz (herbs at wideopenwest dot com) -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com: Don't you feel yourself in a loop? If they patch it, they apparently want to use it and if they want to use it, it is not useless for them because if it were useless, they would not use it and thus they would have no reason to patch it. No! The problem is that people should start saying that certain parts of the old TeX world are irrelevant and so they should not be part of any TeX distribution. For example, on a set of recently compiled binaries I see the following: apostolo@nadya ./tex This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2012/dev) **^D ! End of file on the terminal... why? apostolo@nadya ./pdftex This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012/dev) restricted \write18 enabled. **^C The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files. This is because you invoke pdfetex under the name tex, in other works, you ask pdfetex to forget pdf output and e-TeX extensions and behave as the old Knuth's TeX. Thus pdfetex does nothing but responds exactly with what you asked for. If the modern computer environment does not offer important features that were implemented in the old environment decades and still work, than (at least for me) it is natural to use the old environment. That is called conservatism, that is, something against progress... A.S. -- Apostolos Syropoulos Xanthi, Greece -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -- Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
Re: [XeTeX] Babel
On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 09:44:22PM +0200, Zdenek Wagner wrote: 2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com: The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files. This is because you invoke pdfetex under the name tex, in other works, you ask pdfetex to forget pdf output and e-TeX extensions and behave as the old Knuth's TeX. Thus pdfetex does nothing but responds exactly with what you asked for. The `tex` binary in TL is Knuth's vanilla¹ TeX, not pdftex nor etex. ¹ not counting extensions like encTeX, MLTeX and other web2c changes -- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
