Communications of the Tex Users Group Tugboat Editor
نویسنده
چکیده
Professor Donald Knuth’s TEX is a typesetting system with a wide user community, and a range of supporting packages and enhancements available for many types of publishing work. However, it dates back to the 1980s and is tightly wedded to 8-bit character data and custom-encoded fonts, making it difficult to configure TEX for many complex-script languages. "is paper will introduce X E TEX, a system that extends TEX with direct support for modern OpenType and AAT (Apple Advanced Typography) fonts and the Unicode character set. "is makes it possible to typeset almost any script and language with the same power and flexibility as TEX has traditionally offered in the 8-bit, simple-script world of European languages. X E TEX (currently available on MacOSX, but possibly on other platforms in the future) integrates the TEX formatting engine with technologies from both the host operating system (Apple Type Services, CoreGraphics, QuickTime) and auxiliary libraries (ICU, TECkit), to provide a simple yet powerful system for multilingual and multiscript typesetting. "emost significant extensions X E TEX provides are its native support for the Unicode character set, replacing the myriad of 8bit encodings traditionally used in TEX with a single standard for both input text encoding and font access; and an extended \font command that provides direct access by name to all the fonts installed in the user’s computer. It also provides a mechanism to access many of the advanced layout features of modern fonts. Additional features that will also be discussed include builtin support for a wide variety of graphic file formats, and an extended line-breaking mechanism that supports Asian languages such as Chinese or "ai that are written without word spaces. Finally, we look briefly at some user-contributed packages that help integrate the features of X E TEX with the established LTEX system. Will Robertson’s fontspec.sty provides a simple, consistent user interface in LTEX for loading both AAT and OpenType fonts, and accessing virtually all of the advanced features these fonts offer; Ross Moore’s xunicode.sty is a package that allows legacy LTEX documents to be typeset using native MacOSX fonts without converting the input text entirely to Unicode, by supporting traditional TEX input conventions for accents and other “special” (non-ASCII) characters.
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