On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 11:00 AM, William Adams <[email protected]> wrote: > On Oct 28, 2011, at 9:00 AM, Dominik Wujastyk wrote: > >> Personally, I would not mind if XeTeX went into maintenance mode. I like >> such stability. It already has a great deal of functionality, probably >> enough to last me the rest of my writing career. I do take Vafa's point, >> though, that if future OS platforms break XeTeX, it would be nice to have >> someone fix things up. > > Here in the U.S., it's almost time for United Way payroll deduction > contributions to be allocated --- I've been donating to TUG for a couple of > years, but would be willing to direct my TUG contribution to XeTeX > maintenance if others would be similarly inclined. >
Money can help, but unless very big piles of it are available, it is more critical to generate a passion for good typography in people who have the techical abilities needed for the work. I conjecture that the number of people with both the passion and abilities needed is currently empty. Clearly there are many current xetex users with the interest, and commercial software developers employ people to write code to render texts using the MS and Apple API's, so there are also people with the abilities. Some may not be able to contribute to xetex by the terms of their employment, and some whose passion lies with their employers products would not have considered contributing to xetex. Knuth has made many outstanding contributions, but not the least is to raise typography to the first rank of problems in computing. If you want to create a pool of people with a passion for computer typography, effort needs to go towards expanding awareness of Knuth's work in typography and issues that remain. To get things started, here is my list: 0. Why is Tex still necessary? My impression is that Knuth hoped to see his work used in more creative ways than TeX distros. 1. Knuth wanted to create beautiful books, yet many distinctly unbeautiful books are still being published. Lack of support for font design size, too similar fonts used for text and maths (e.g., same glyph for letter "a" and variable "a") contribute to lack of beauty. I'm reminded of Knuth's early paper in which he analyzed bugs in discarded decks of punched cards and found many examples of errors resulting from failure to apply well-known principles taught in into courses. 2. Knuth created his own fonts and tools and these are still part of a TeX system. What problems are still present in the fonts and support provided by modern GUI environments? 3. Knuth was concerned with maths. There are now many groups that use TeX for documents that do not involved maths. What do the descendants of TeX have that other general purpose tools lack? 4. Knuth was concerned primarily with typeset material. Since then there have been developments in linearization/flattened maths for communications, and math markup for web (html) documents. 5. Knuth built a compiler that is used in batch mode, but the majority of documents are created using GUI tools. What use cases are better served by batch mode, and in what cases is TeX used by default because of available GUI tools refuse to play. -- George N. White III <[email protected]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
