[OS X TeX] metapost

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 22.03.2013 um 17:40 schrieb NMPOST7:

> 1. I am at present doing a documentation using the "malayalam" package
>   The package has a preprocessor, that I have not managed to run on my mac
>   (Leopard).

Do you know XeTeX? XeTeX (and LuaTeX) documents are in Unicode (UTF-8 or UTF-16 encodings for example). No pre-processing is necessary, you just input the Malayalam text as-is.

With the pre-processor you have a complicated task in creating the final PDF file. In this case it's probably not a big problem to use METAPOST and feed its output somehow into the file, but with XeTeX you can produce the final PDF in one compilation step.

On Leopard you still can upgrade (via net-install) to TeX Live 2012 (which has a new XeTeX version that is based on HarfBuzz, found in the X servers on linux, and might have some advantage over the previous version) – I did it recently to become able to test the new XeTeX versions. And it's certain that TeX Live 2013 will support Leopard.

There is also a specialised XeTeX mailing list. It has Mac, Linux, and MS users.


When you have very special requests for the graphics you need to include, PSTricks might be an option. Its users contribute so many specialised packages with prêt-à-utiliser graphical objects.

--
Greetings

  Pete

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
		– Bill Watterson, in his comic strip Calvin and Hobbes