Let me try to focus this discussion back to a more general level. Keep
in mind that I am a scholar and sometime font creator, not a programmer.
A great many people, myself included, must use non-Latin scripts in
their work. They may also need to produce typographically sophisticated
documents for publication, using advanced font technologies. Xe(La)TeX
is /amazing/ in that it (along with Polyglossia) can do all of this, and
for free, whether one wants to use AAT, Graphite, or OpenType fonts.
Language support, thanks to Unicode, has gradually worked its way into
current OSs; but there are still many of us who remember what a
nightmare it was to use Greek or Cyrillic, to say nothing of Arabic or
Devanagari, in pre-Unicode days. Advanced typographic support is
gradually improving in mainstream apps, but still not where I'd like to
see it, sometimes even in high-priced software that is designed for
professional typesetting.
Yes, there are flaws in XeTeX, e.g., in connection with Hangul support.
But I repeat: from the larger perspective, XeTeX is without peer in
terms of what it lets one accomplish in multilingual, high-quality
typesetting. I am in awe of what Jonathan and others were able to do in
updating TeX to meet these modern needs.
I very much hope that XeTeX will be around for a long time. It was
reassuring that hear that Khaled, with some help from Jonathan, will
help XeTeX continue; I hope there are others who can help too. But the
bottom line is that there can be no real replacement for XeTeX without
support for multilingual typesetting, including complex scripts. Those
who want to develop new flavors of TeX are welcome to do so, and maybe
someday one of them will have evolved to the point where it can replace
Xe(La)TeX. That may be a good thing, but I suspect it's a long way off.
David
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