[OS X TeX] gtamacfonts ligatures: PDF searchability

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 28 mars 06 à 14:47, William Adams a écrit :

> The solution here is to use XeTeX, and to improve it and support for
> it, so there're no reasons not to use it.

But there are at least two reasons for which some people can't use  
XeTeX right now as their main TeX platform (apart from the speed  
issue, which isn't so important IMO):

- The huge number of LaTeX packages which assume you are either using  
dvips or pdfTeX, and have no driver file for XeTeX (or, even worse,  
bypass the driver file mechanism by hard-coding driver-specific  
instructions within the .sty package file itself). Think of all the  
users of beamer, for example. And I'm not even speaking of packages,  
like pstricks, which rely entirely on dvips.

- The way XeTeX deals with Mac fonts, letting the Mac OS X font  
mechanism set the baseline. This results in uneven line spacing,  
especially in maths documents with inline subscripts, superscripts  
and the like, and makes the output unsuitable for wide distribution.  
(I know there are workarounds, involving fussing with \linespread  
IIRC, but they are not perfect and require a fair level of  
familiarity with plain TeX internals.)

The second point is why I'm not using XeTeX yet as my main TeX  
platform, though I would otherwise quite like to do so.

Furthermore, it would seem unfair from Apple to prevent "pre- 
processing" of the OS X fonts for TeX use: this would result in  
discrimination, regarding which software can use the fonts and which  
software can't. (I know a lawyer would probably object to this  
reasoning -- it feels suspiciously like the Apple vs. French DRM  
draft law issue --, but this is how it feels in any case.)

Bruno Voisin------------------------- Info --------------------------
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