Re: [AUCTeX-devel] AUCTeX and Mac OS X

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 30.06.2005 um 10:19 schrieb David Kastrup:

> Peter Dyballa <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > Mac OS X (not Darwin) offers a special font technology to allow
> > XeTeX (http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?
> > site_id=nrsi&item_id=XeTeX&). What about adding to the Command menu
> > a XeTeX/XeLaTeX option when on Mac OS X? Depending on the type of
> > source file either XeTeX or XeLaTeX is displayed in the Command menu
> > and the corresponding programme is invoked to tex the buffer? With
> > the first e being ɘ, the LATIN SMALL LETTER REVERSED E at U+0258?
>
> Since this appears to be an entirely different TeX distribution, a
> separate file with predefinitions for TeX and LaTeX (similar to what
> miktel.el and fptex.el provide), would seem like the saner course of
> action.

No, XeTeX is an add-on to any TeX that runs on Mac OS X (because of the 
font technology, but there seems to be something coming for the Windows 
or Linux world, a font renderer, that would allow similiar performance 
on other platforms, besides that Apple is migrating to intel). It 
depends on all the style and class files and just has a few extra files 
that help in choosing and using the text font and its more advanced 
features (different shapes of the same character, use of old style 
figures and ligatures, other font variants ...). It does not produce 
DVI. It's UTF-8 based.

> It does not appear likely that people would use XeTeX and other TeX's
> in tandem, right?  It is more like an either/or thing, and so there
> does not appear to be much merit to have two menu entries of which one
> will never get used.

That's not right: XeTeX has big, big problems with math. It's quite 
useless in that area. So if you have to provide a text with many 
formulas in it you have to 'return' to usual TeX.

XeTeX/XeLaTeX are really good when setting a text in a non-Latin or an 
old and now historic script, completely or partly, mixing left-to-right 
with right-to-left (could be that recent Emacsen might fail to keep 
pace, but this might become an interesting test case for GNU Emacs 23). 
And its support mustn't be as much as in tex-fptex.el: the output is 
always PDF and you have only one binary, xetex, and symlinks pointing 
to it (xelatex, xeinitex, xevirtex). The production works in two steps 
by the the help of xdv2pdf. It is completely transparent since it's 
xetex that spawns xdv2pdf, only error messages can reveal that it's two 
programmes. So I thought of one more menu entry which name is exchanged 
dynamically from XɘTeX to XɘLaTeX when AUCTeX sees a \documentclass ...

Jonathan_Kew (at) sil.org is XeTeX man.

--
Mit friedvollen Grüßen

  Pete

"They're putting dimes in the hole in my head to see the change in me."