Re: XeTeX 1.0 - request for comments

On Oct 17, 2005, at 12:11 PM, Bernd wrote:

> I'm not completely sure if this comment suits the request as well but 
> I remember while trying different things with Xelatex that I 
> encountered a dissimilarity between output of Xelatex and plain Latex. 
> This is if I try to get exactly the same output with both environments 
> they are still different in many places, even though I used the 
> default settings. For example I used Palatino and some usual text. The 
> output was different in font shape, letter spaces and so on. Would it 
> be useful to make Xelatex and Latex more congruent to each other so 
> one could easily switch between the two environments? I think it is 
> because sometimes I have to write something and somehow I need to use 
> Xelatex-related features an then I have to change all the settings 
> again to get the same look as before. Also I think the Xelatex output 
> is good but not yet perfect compared to Latex (but still better than 
> anything else :-) related to typesetting issues (i.e. see above). But 
> this applies only to the latin font ssues.

The problem here is that Palatino OpenType is different from Palatino 
Type 1 --- you can ``fix'' this by limiting XeTeX to using 
hand-installed Type 1 fonts to a certain degree, but really, it's the 
old font setup and scheme which hasn't kept up.

That said, I really respect, admire, and am grateful for the work which 
has gone into mathpazo and mathptmx

> Arabic is really great and looks just perfect to me.

Focus on what's right and I think you'll find XeTeX better ;)

William

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William Adams, publishing specialist
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