Folks, I read lots of messages on the XeTeX and TeX on OS X mailing lists of the form "I'm in the middle of a project using XeTeX; how do I do ….?" This, plus information from personal contacts, convinces me that XeTeX is heavily used by people with real work to be done.
XeTeX runs fine on Lion, and other Macintosh systems. The minor problem, as others have pointed out, is that it uses the ATSUI font libraries rather than Core Text. When Apple enabled 64 bit GUI applications in Leopard at the end of 2007, they didn't convert ATSUI to 64 bits, so XeTeX is a 32 bit application on the Mac. When we introduced 64 bit versions of TeX apps in MacTeX, timing tests showed that the speed increase with 64 bits was minor. For that reason, adding those 64 bit versions was mildly controversial, and the need to compile XeTeX in 64 bits isn't urgent. Having said all of that, it would be wonderful if someone would take on the task of converting the Macintosh portions of XeTeX from ATSUI to Core Text, since it would remove the worry that Apple (at some distant time) would remove the 32 bit ATSUI Library from the system, and would allow us to compile all of TeX Live in 64 bits. Dick Koch -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
