The XeTeX typesetting system

 Reply
"Mark Dancer", Fri, Oct 26, 2007 01:12 (CDT)
Re: The Beauty of LaTeX

Dario,

The first example (kerning) is wrong. Word will kern based on the kerning tables built into the font, it's just switched off by default (bad choice of default by MS). To turn it on (in Word X anyway), select the text, select Format -> Font..., choose the Character Spacing tab, and check the box "Kerning for fonts").

Overall, the premise behind your web page is great, but where it falls down is that you're comparing apples to oranges.

Comparing a typographic system like XeTeX to a work processor like MS Word on the basis of their typographic capabilities is a like comparing a calculator to a computer and complaining the calculator can't browse the web, play music, or typeset my thesis.

A more valid comparison would be between XeTeX and a professional page layout program like InDesign (it took me about five minutes to duplicate all of your examples, mosts of which was spent on the Zapfino example figuring out how to access the alternate glyphs).

If you were going to compare apples to apples (XeTeX to InDesign), you would need to show XeTeX can mimic all the features of Adobe InDesign and/or Quark Xpress:

- optical margin alignment: creating visually (as opposed to mathmatically) correct margins, which involves hanging characters like "T" out into the margin;

- hanging punctutation: when punctuation like quotes start a paragraph, they are placed in the margin; when hyphens, em-dash and such like end a paragraph, they also are placed out into the margin;

- optical character kerning: automatially adjusting the kerning based on the actual shapes of the characters rather than the build in kerning table--very useful when the kerning table is incomplete (or worse, wrong);

- automatically import and format an XML document;

- anything that Xpress can do that InDesign can't.

Then you would need to show that there are things InDesign can't do that XeTex can.

[Note: I'm a casual user of InDesign and a complete novice at Tex]

Mark.

 Reply
jonathan, Sun, Jan 27, 2008 04:08 (CST)
Re: hyphenation

I don't know exactly how language settings in LyX interact with XeLaTeX, so can't answer this directly. I would suggest that you ask on the  XeTeX mailing list, and provide a small test document that shows the problem. With a sample to examine, someone on the mailing list can probably work out what is happening and suggest a solution.

 Reply
jonathan, Mon, Jan 28, 2008 10:57 (CST)
Re: difference between Miktex and texlive for using xetex

There was a bug in version 0.996 that affected certain types of formatting in right-to-left text; I think this would have affected the item labels in these environments, for example. This was fixed in 0.996-patch1 and in 0.997.

Therefore, the most likely explanation is that you're seeing the correct behavior in MikTeX, but the older TeX Live release is giving incorrect output. If you're able to rebuild from current TeX Live sources, or use a distribution such as Debian, which I believe has applied "patch1" to 0.996, you should get better results.

TeX Live 2008 will of course have an updated release of XeTeX.

If you have further questions, I recommend asking them on the  mailing list; you will find several users of Persian and Arabic script there, as well as other experienced users and developers.

 Reply
jonathan, Thu, Mar 27, 2008 17:56 (CDT) [modified by jonathan on Fri, Apr 11, 2008 07:04 (CDT)]
Re: Arabic sample

So it did. That was a limitation of the font that was used for the typesetting operation; many (especially older) fonts don't support lam-alef ligatures with marks.

I have generated a new image using the current version of Scheherazade, and the ligature now appears correctly.

 Reply
jonathan, Tue, Apr 1, 2008 08:51 (CDT)
Re: FontFolio 11 and XeTeX...

1. I don't have the Adobe FontFolio product, but I know that some recent Adobe fonts use a different form of the OpenType tables and require a fairly recent build of XeTeX to support these features. So you might need to update to a newer version than shipped (for example) with TeX Live 2007.

2. Is this feature supported in conjunction with superscripts in these fonts? If not, you'd have to disable the use of "real" superscript digits, and fake them with scaling and shifting instead. I think the fontspec package can do this; check the documentation and/or ask on the mailing list.

3. You should be able to use the fontspec package to change fonts as needed. But in any case I don't think you should be getting bitmapped fonts; this suggests a configuration problem with the font map files.

It's not really practical to provide detailed support via comments here; try the  XeTeX mailing list for more advice.

 Reply
jonathan, Fri, Apr 11, 2008 03:06 (CDT)
Re: How to insert pdf file (> 1 pages) in xelatex

With xetex 0.997 (from MikTeX, W32TeX, or other up-to-date packages), you can use the pdfpages package to do this. With older releases, you'd have to use a separate \includegraphics command for each page, with the 'page' option to select each in turn.

Please take questions like this to the  mailing list, as this comment mechanism isn't really suitable for technical support questions.

 Reply
jonathan, Fri, May 9, 2008 05:26 (CDT)
Re: Hown to up to date Xetex 997 for Texlive 2007

Unless someone provides updated packages for your particular distribution, you'd have to check out a copy of the source and build it yourself; see the "build-xetex" and "install-xetex" scripts provided in the source tree.

If you're running on Windows, the W32TeX distribution offers a recent XeTeX build that can be used with a TeX Live installation.

TeX Live 2008 will of course include an up-to-date XeTeX release, but is not yet ready.

 Reply
jonathan, Tue, Jun 24, 2008 05:03 (CDT)
Re: Xetex and diagxy

Try asking for advice on the  mailing list. I don't know anything about this package, but you might find other users there who can help.

 Reply
jonathan, Thu, Jul 10, 2008 06:26 (CDT)
Re: Cropping image/pdf file

The mailing list (see above) is the best place to ask something like this.