McEs, A Hacker Life: Back

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Back

So I did a little hacking to mirror my feed such that blogger does not get upset about planet fetching too regularly. In the meantime, I was at DDC and OLS and did a lot of hacking on dasher, cairo, and pango. As a result, I'm a cairo programmer (not developer) now. Finally moving on to preload. GIMPed hackergotchis for hub and jg and sent to jdub too. Man put 'em up.

I just found XeTeX yesterday. After reading the paper, I believe they are on a right track, as far as comparison to Omega is concerned. Several fundamental assumptions of Knuth's work and era have been proven wrong, and the the arhchivability through code-freeze is no exception. I think the comparison between a self-contained system like TeX/Omega and the XeTeX approach is exactly like C versus Java.

In other words, we can get the idea, plug Pango and Cairo in, and get a decent portable i18n'ized TeX-based typesetting system. No more font and complex-text-layout code duplication... WOW!

Interesting link stolen from jwz: WORLDPROCESSOR Catalog.

¶ 5:24 PM

Comments:

Caution! The worldprocessor link may test you kernel's out-of-memory killer.

# posted by

Anonymous : August 02, 2005 11:43 PM

I have a gig of that on my lap. No problem here. :)

# posted by

behdad : August 02, 2005 11:44 PM

Please explain a bit more what you'd like to do with the XeTeX thing (in combination with pango and cairo). In my limited view of things typesetting produces dvi/ps/pdf output, which per se doesn't have much to do with rendering.
As an AbiWord dev i'd very much be interested in getting, say, TeXmacs screen typesetting quality.

- Rob

# posted by

Anonymous : August 03, 2005 5:17 AM

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