[Textures] Beta 11 is out

[Paolo Matteucci]

Thank you, Bruno: very informative, as always.
It would be nice if Blue Sky were a bit more open about what their plans and
timescales are, and there was some kind of "official roadmap"… Anyone
listening? ;-)

Personally, I think that no TeX system —no matter how fast, user-friendly or
OS-compliant— can afford *nowadays* to do without [some form of] Unicode and
Open Type support, let alone a commercial one.

Thanks,

Paolo


2009/8/19 Bruno Voisin <bvoisin at me.com>

> Le 19 août 09 à 13:21, Paolo Matteucci a écrit :
>
>  I’d like to ask you a somewhat related question. My two main problems with
>> Textures have always been that it doesn’t support (or didn’t use to support
>> —not quite sure where we’ve got to with the latest beta release) hyperref
>> fully and, much more importantly, (2) [although Textures was probably the
>> first TeX program ever to be able to access "system fonts" easily] there
>> isn’t [yet] a way to access [à la XeTeX, say] all AAT/OT font glyphs
>> [easily]…
>>
>> What are your thoughts about these two points? Have you got any "inside
>> information" about if and when these issues might be resolved?
>>
>
> Hi Paolo,
>
> No I've no inside information about Textures, unfortunately.
>
> And about your two questions, I'm afraid the answer is also a "I don't
> know" to both. I checked about hyperref support and it appears it's not
> supported, even with the [hypertex] option.
>
> BTW, the Textures drivers htexture.def for hyperref and textures.def for
> graphics/x have both been written for Classic Textures (version 2.1 and
> below) and don't really work with OS X Textures. For example, with the
> graphics/x package each graphics inclusion in the log window will yield a
> message "Graphic file (Type EPSF)" even though the graphics file is not an
> EPSF. Here's what I'm getting with a PNG file:
>
>        File: figs-png/singcylamphor.png Graphic file (type EPSF)
>
> This message is not generated by Textures but by textures.def, I imagine by
> the following line:
>
>    \ProvidesFile{#3}[Graphic file (type #1)]%
>
> But in any case the PNG file is correctly included, independent of what the
> Log says.
>
> Back to hyperref: At the time I still had a PPC Mac, I looked at the way
> hyperlinks worked with Classic Textures and realized this way was different
> from the way we're used to now with PDF output. You didn't just need to
> click on a hyperlink, you needed to use a modifier key (probably Cmd i.e.
> the Apple or clover key, but I'm not sure). So it's no surprise it will have
> to be re-implemented in some way to work the way we're used to now (and
> which we need: my need with hyperlinks is to produce PDF files that I can
> send for work to people so they can use them in Acrobat or Preview or any
> PDF viewer, not to produce hyperlinks which only work in Textures).
>
> It's probably also not trivial, as Textures for now can only produce PDF
> files through the Print dialog, by printing to a PDF file. But so doing so
> creates PDF files with no hyperlinks, only the visual aspect of the output
> is reserved in the PDF file created by Apple's Quartz framework. There must
> be some way to circumvent this limitation, as iWork (Pages etc.) export PDF
> files with hyperlinks while using the Quartz framework.
>
> As for the fonts, I don't know what's planned. The TeX Metrics window (in
> the Window menu) gives a rough idea about what Textures knows about fonts.
> In particular if you click on the "PostScript name" column header you'll see
> the fonts used in the current preview window come to the top of the column.
> That's about all I know.
>
> It seems in any case what we could do with the last versions of Classic
> Textures -- use any font known to the OS by using a special syntax for
> calling it (I don't remember this syntax) -- is not yet implemented in OS X
> Textures. I don't know either if there are plans of Unicode support and
> OpenType support. I hope so.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
>
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