On Mon, Apr 27 2015 at 3:34 CEST, xetex-requ...@tug.org writes: > Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2015 10:34:25 +0900 > From: Simon Cozens <si...@simon-cozens.org> > To: "XeTeX (Unicode-based TeX) discussion." <xetex@tug.org> > Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Future *TeX [was: XeTeX maintenance] > Message-ID: <553d9221.2000...@simon-cozens.org> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" > > On 26/04/2015 23:02, Karljurgen Feuerherm wrote: >> b) assuming a certain level of Xe(La)TeX competence at the ?presenting? >> level, what recommendations would experts on this list make to ?upping the >> ante? I.e. progress toward a more insider understanding of the software? > > OK, I can answer this but I shall add a few other scattered thoughts as > well. :-) > > First I also want to thank Khaled for his fantastic work in keeping > xetex maintained, bugs fixed, and users happy. Until recently I presumed > that Khaled was a professional software and/or typography person; I > didn't realise that xetex was essentially a free time project for him. I > was even more amazed by his dedication and professionalism.
Me too. > > Bit by bit, I seem to have picked up how TeX and xetex works, and I wish > I could help with the maintainership, but I just don't have the time at > present. (And given that I think the future of TeX is spelt "SILE" I > don't think it's appropriate for me to either. ;-) ) > > How to get to know xetex? I think the first step in moving from a user > to understanding the mechanics has to be Victor Eijkhout's TeX By Topic. > Either buy a hard copy or download it from > https://bitbucket.org/VictorEijkhout/tex-by-topic/src and read it over > four or five times. It's by far the best introduction to how the TeX > engine works. I support this. The strange thing is that despite such a large community of users nobody created a TeX debugger. The only one unfinished attempt seems to that presented in 1995 (!) in Bachotek: Lutz Birkhan: The TeX debugger Proceedings of the Eight European TEX Conference, September 26-30, 1994, Gdańsk, Poland, pp 91-95. The interface seemed quite reasonable and the author was willing to make the code available, but looks like nobody was interested. My tiny contribution is also unfinished: https://bitbucket.org/jsbien/emacs-tex-output-browser Best regards Janusz -- , Prof. dr hab. Janusz S. Bien - Uniwersytet Warszawski (Katedra Lingwistyki Formalnej) Prof. Janusz S. Bien - University of Warsaw (Formal Linguistics Department) jsb...@uw.edu.pl, jsb...@mimuw.edu.pl, http://fleksem.klf.uw.edu.pl/~jsbien/ -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
