2011/10/28 Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) <p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk>: > > > Mojca Miklavec wrote: >> >> On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 13:19, Vafa Khalighi wrote: >>> >>> Hi >>> Since Jonathan has no time any more for coding XeTeX, then what will be >>> the >>> state of XeTeX in TeX distributions such as TeXLive? will be XeTeX >>> removed >>> from TeXLive just like Aleph and Omega (in favour of LuaTeX) were removed >>> from TeXLive? >> >> 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. 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. > If I understand Mojca correctly, she compared XeTeX to Omega. Look what was needed to typeset a Devanagari text in Omega. It was necessary to plug a few OTP's. Some users somehow managed to do it but it required non-TeX files. In XeTeX you have to define that the font is in the Devanagari script and the rest is just TeX.
> Philip Taylor > > > > > -------------------------------------------------- > 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