Hello, as stated at the very beginning and the preface of the XeTeX Companion, I consider myself merely as a "maintainer" of that document. It was always my intention to make and keep this document freely available to all, at the same time inviting all those who would like to contribute to add material where they like.
At the moment the source uses some technically complex setup, due to history (accumulation of definitions and implementation hacks we used for the various editions of the three companions). The first thing perhaps would be to sanitize the markup by using, e.g., the memoir class (or whatever) so that everybody would have a common framework. I am open to any proposal the community might consider useful. Regards, Michel Goossens -----Original Message----- From: xetex-boun...@tug.org [mailto:xetex-boun...@tug.org] On Behalf Of Michiel Kamermans Sent: 08 September 2010 11:25 To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms Subject: Re: [XeTeX] XeTeX documentation "initiative" On 9/7/2010 9:23 PM, Wilfred van Rooijen wrote: > It seems that there have been no replies to the list about Michiel's proposal > to make a combined xe(la)tex reference manual and user manual. Personally I > would be willing to contribute, but I am not an expert on xetex, rather a > casual user with perhaps "advanced" experience of using latex for several > types of (scientific) publications. Michiel, what exactly so you have in > mind? A Xe(La)TeX Companion, i.e. similar to the latex companion but based on > xelatex, and then expanded to include more references to xetex specific > commands and programming? > > I can see something like this: a user manual focusing on xelatex, typesetting > of scientific works, bibtex and the associated front ends, hyperref etc, > beamer to make presentations, TikZ (2D and 3D) to make figures, in short, > something like a latex companion but modernized and expanded to include a > reference manual. > That was my idea. I was considering starting with the "XeTeX companion" [1] that Michel Goossens collaboratively started in 1996, and extending it/updating it to cover the basic topic of TeX, the specific topic of the XeTeX flavour, and all commonly used packages that end up being discussed on this list again and again (fontspec, polyglossia, hyperref, xeCJK, bidi, etc), as well as a section on writing your own commands and package, also highlighting common basic TeX commands you should at least have seen if you want to have any hope of writing a decent XeTeX command yourself, like the "Plain TeX Quick Reference" [2], but then adapted to also contain the XeTeX specific commands that let one write a generally useful macro. A section on pdf-related commands would also be essential, I think, especially for those who need to generate production PDF (several people in the past year asked questions falling under that topic). Of course, hijacking Michel's work wouldn't be very nice, but if he doesn't mind a fresh batch of document contributions then we're already well on our way to having an up to date document that we can point to and say "this should be able to get you from never having used (La)TeX to general purpose Xe(La)TeX use". (And ideally keeping it free, even if it ends up available in book form. I personally found that the one truly annoying thing about the LaTeX companion - I don't mind paying for a reference work after it turns out it is the reference work I need, but what's the point of a free typesetting engine when the documentation costs a non-trivial amount of money? It always seemed to me the one real reason LaTeX is considered so inaccessible to the general public) - Mike [1] http://xml.web.cern.ch/XML/lgc2/xetexmain.pdf [1] http://infohost.nmt.edu/tcc/help/pubs/texcrib.pdf -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex