EuroBachoTEX 2007

The first speaker was Jonathan Kew, who related the history and current status of X E TEX. After its initial appearance in the spring of 2004 on MacOSX, a version supporting OpenType fonts appeared the following year. X E TEX for Linux was announced at BachoTEX 2006, and was quickly followed in June by a version for Windows. This year marked a milestone for the X E TEX project, in that it became an integral part of TEX Live distribution. Key features of the current X E TEX implementation include its native Unicode support, improved integration with existing macro packages and its smart inclusion of hyphenation patterns. Looking ahead, future releases will support host operating system fonts (OpenType, TrueType and PostScript) with no TEX-specific setup. Another new feature is inter-character tokens— inserting arbitrary tokens in-between adjacent characters based on character classes. This allows one to easily mix scripts and fonts, or insert spacing to stretch text. Finally, to better support non-Latin scripts, minority languages, and scripts not yet in Unicode, X E TEX will support SIL’s Graphite font system.