Talk:XeTeX

Annoying

It took me 2½ hours to get the sample work. First of all: XeTeX is a package addon that allows the text author to use Unicode UTF-8 encoding for what appears to be jolly good old TeX, or on the user option jolly good old LaTeX. There are two different commands, one xetex and the other xelatex. I would guess that xetex and xelatex are preprocessors before tex and latex, but there's something with the fonts. It appears that xetex uses user installed local fonts of vector type, and it probably does so on the run, tweaking the behavior of tex/latex to accept the installed local vector fonts. Iff this is the case, XeTeX is phantastiqual indeed! xelatex is the command to use for the code.

Now, that means that the article text sample <PROFANITY/>s! Because it requires both Lucida Sans Unicode and Hoefler Text Italic, and those are fonts that only exists in evil proprietary operating systems. Said: Rursus (☻) 13:46, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

They are not preprocessors. And your comment doesn't improve the article.--Oneiros (talk) 14:43, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

example non-latin text

Russian (and probably Greek too) text in the example is not just meaningless, but grammatically incorrect. This is quite distracting, I think it should be replaced by something meaningful as in the most places in Wikipedia. Virage (talk) 03:27, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Hi, I'm the author of the XeTeX example, to be honest I don't remember where I got the Greek and Russian blurbs from, but I am happy to change it to anything more meaningful and reupload the output. Suggestions? --DarTar (talk) 11:26, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Hi, I suggest something like Lord Prayer, in Modern Orthography or in pre-1917 Orthography (the latter has letters that not present in the most non-unicode encoding, so an additional demonstration). So You might put

Отче нашъ, Иже еси на небесѣхъ! да святится имя Твое; да пріидетъ Царствіе Твое; да будетъ воля Твоя, яко на небеси, и на земли; хлѣбъ нашъ насущный даждь намъ днесь; и остави намъ долги наша, якоже и мы оставляемъ должникомъ нашимъ; и не введи насъ во искушеніе, но избави насъ отъ лукаваго. Яко Твое есть царство, и сила, и слава во вѣки, аминь.

--Virage (talk) 05:38, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

It seems to me it should be more neutral. Like this /ru/XeTeX — about Wikipedia only.

W-495 (talk) 03:46, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

Pronunciation

From the edit history:

• (citation for pronounciation) User:Orgads
  • this linked to a discussion on a mailing list of how various individuals pronounced the word; it's no more a valid source than this discussion
  • at the time, the prounciations given were /ziːtɛx, -χ/ with a strange comment that /χ/ isn't an English sound.
• the citation given was not a reliable source, so i've removed it, and made the pronunciations given follow those of TeX) User:Cassowary
  • the pronunciations I refer to is /ziːtɛx, -k/
• (If you ever listened to a talk by its author, you'd know the pronounciation is correct; I'll try to find a link to a video of a talk of his.) User:Pohta ce-am pohtit
  • this reverted the prounciation to the /-x, -χ/ form.
• (add ref for pron) User:Pohta ce-am pohtit

I have reverted your reversion, User:Pohta ce-am pohtit, because your source once again provides absolutely no evidence for the use of uvular fricative and provides absolutely no evidence that the a fricative is mandatory. In fact, by saying "zee-TeX" i.e. providing a pronounciation respelling of only half the word, and using the standard TeX casing, he's saying "pronounce the second syllable however you'd normally pronounce "TeX". (In case there's any ambiguity, it's transparently obvious that this isn't a SAMPA transcription, because otherwise it would correspond to /zee.θeχ/ and no-one's arguing that.)

In addition, it is clear Jonathan Kew doesn't consider his pronunciation normative; he says "I don't have a strong opinion".

For third parties, the page is [1] and the relevant section is:

I don’t have a strong opinion on the “correct” pronunciation, though personally I say zee-TeX. There was some discussion of this on the mailing list recently, and it was clear that the “natural” pronunciation depends on people’s native language — which is fine with me.

Please do not change the text again unless you can provide a relevant source. However, given Jonathan Kew's own words—in a source you've provided—I'm sure it will be very difficult to provide one. —Felix the Cassowary 13:07, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Reply

Since you appear to be an expert on phonetics, perhaps you can clear a couple of points:

• Wikipedia:IPA_for_English does not list χ, so why do you claim that it is an English sound?
• Could you just listen to any of the talks from [2] and let us know how, in your expert opinion, Kew's pronunciation has to be rendered in IPA? We don't have to mention in this article how it must be pronounced, since there's no decree in that regard, but we could say how the author pronounces it.

Thanks, Pcap ping 15:25, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

I didn't claim [χ] was an English sound (or at least, I didn't intend to, but I can see how you might interpret that in), I just expressed myself badly. Including it and insisting it's a/the valid pronunciation even though [χ] isn't an English sound is what was strange in my mind, plus saying that and not saying anything about [x] which to my knowledge most people don't use (in words like "Bach" or "loch" or whatever).

As for Jonathan Kew's pronunciation, I listened to the first few minutes of "What's new in XeTeX world" from BachoTeX08, and I think he pronounced "(Xe)TeX" with a /k/. Occasionally it might be fricated (i.e. [x]), but this is a reasonably common process in English that is meaningless to most people (i.e. it's probably just an allophone selected by free variation, and if I hadn't been listening for it specifically I wouldn't've heard it).

Not however that this (the recording I mean, not my interpretation of it) is not a source for the pronunciation of XeTeX, it's a source for how its creator pronounced it on one occasion, when he admitted he was sick (so perhaps he normally uses /x/ but he felt it was too much effort), or maybe he mispronounced it compared to his preferences because this was a presentation and he might've been a bit nervous. The only valid source I'm aware of is when he said he says "zee-TeX", but that he has no strong opinions on how you should say it, which we can interpret as permitting both the -x and -k pronounciations as equally valid.

On top of that, you can't cite this because it's just my interpretation of what I think I hear from a suboptimal recording (most are!). Sure I have some training in phonetics and phonology, but this is just me writing what I think I hear.

What I put there last is the best guide to the pronunciation I think.

—Felix the Cassowary 15:49, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Thank you both for your contributions. Now please improve the article: It's still only Start-class.--Oneiros (talk) 18:39, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes sir, I will si—— wait a second, who put you in charge? It might be best if you assumed we would improve Wikipedia in the ways we thought we could do best; I certainly do that of you. —Felix the Cassowary 12:50, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Comparison of TeX engines

Possibly we should create a wiki page for comparison TeX engines: plain TeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX and others. The differences between these engines are not clear in any of wikipedia articles of XeTeX, LuaTeX and so. What do you think?

+1 --DarTar (talk) 08:26, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes please do i came here looking for just that. That would be very valuable. Maybe this link helps in the process: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/36/differences-between-luatex-context-and-xetex —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.147.242.202 (talk) 17:12, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Improvements to the example

I suggest we include a piece of mathematical notation in the example. It would also be great to use some other fonts that are more readily available on people's computers; I for one cannot render the example. (And someone above, who speaks Russian, presented a better Russian text.) —Bromskloss (talk) 15:41, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Mathematical rendering in XeTeX is identical to LaTeX so I don't see the added value of showcasing it. I am happy to improve the previous example (which I uploaded) with better ideas (e.g. the Russian text above), but the focus should be on native Unicode support and advanced typographic rendering (e.g. OpenType feature) which is really the distinctive advantage of XeTeX over other TeX engines. --DarTar (talk) 10:48, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes and no. There's experimental support for Unicode math, something that TeX doesn't have. So the source would look different. I'll see if I can make a sample. I haven't dabbled with xetex in a while... Pcap ping 02:09, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

I have uploaded in the meantime an SVG version using a slightly different sample text, taken from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which happens to be thetext translated in the largest number of languages) and compiled with an open-licensed font (Linux Libertine) instead of commercial or platform-specific fonts. --DarTar (talk) 21:03, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Oh, and I should also note that I am quite annoyed by the stylesheet changes introduced by the new default template in syntax highlighting markup, which breaks the previous layout. Does anyone has a clue how to fix it to render the source as in the French version (which is still using the old default template)? --DarTar (talk)

XeTeX ≠ XeLaTex

Getting documentation on pure XeTeX from the net is a real pain due to many peoples having no idea XeTeX and XeLaTeX are two distinct things (and that also works for TeX and LaTeX and all the family), namely XeTeX is the base language, XeLaTeX and extension of it through macros: both have different, if related, syntaxes and possibilities. That would be helpful if the Wikipedia didn't help spreading the confusion, really. So the "XeTeX" example beginning with the command "\documentclass" and processed by the command "xelatex"? No, good sirs, I don't think so... 88.169.169.248 (talk) 12:11, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Hear! Hear! the example is really wrong, esp w/rt font selection (which is why I am here in the first place). It is a LaTeX example not a TeX example. Can this get fixed? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.203.225.198 (talk) 11:09, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

XeTeX is a TeX engine, while XeLaTeX is a TeX format. The distinction tends to disappear because there are less and less advantages to dump a format for speed performance.--Nbrouard (talk) 09:30, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

Here's a good site on plain XeTeX: https://plain-xetex.neocities.org/ Shreevatsa (talk) 18:50, 17 July 2017 (UTC)