On 28 Oct 2011, at 21:20, Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote: >> >> Omega was remove because it was buggy, unmaintained, but most >> important of all: hardly usable. It took a genius to figure out how to >> use it, while XeTeX is exactly the contrary. It simplifies everything >> in comparison to pdfTeX. > > I think that last remark is grossly unfair, although probably > not intentionally so. XeTeX adds functionality that was non- > existent in PdfTeX, but that hardly makes it simpler.
I know I'm supposed to only respond very occasionally to email these days, but I can't resist adding a comment here. :) IM(NS)HO there is some truth to both sides of this. I believe xetex does make a couple of things _much_ simpler: specifically, the use of a variety of fonts that are not provided by the TeX distribution of your choice, or a TeX-oriented vendor; and working with Unicode, and in particular with non-Latin scripts having complex rendering requirements. While these things could in theory also be done with Omega, achieving them was beyond the ability of all but a very select few experts. On the other hand, the underlying document formatting language and process is still TeX, with all its trickiness and complexity (and power); xetex certainly doesn't make that any simpler. > It > also introduces a non-TeXlike syntax, particularly (perhaps > only) in the extended \font primitive that could (IMHO) > have been better thought out, particularly in the overloading > of string quotes and the introduction of square brackets. Yes, I wish now that this had been done differently, not by gradual extension of the old \font primitive but as a properly-designed new feature, but it kinda "just growed" in response to various needs... it's less than ideal, I agree. JK -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
