XeTeX

You already knew I am a LaTeX fan. I finally got the courage to go and experiment XeTeX. In fact, I was almost forced, as I am the Portuguese official translator for The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX. By the way, you can buy the Original (English) or the Portuguese versions from lulu.com.

OK, enough advertisement. XeTeX is one of two Unicode TeX motors. The other is named luaTeX and I think (didn’t have the time to look into it yet) and is scriptable in the lua programming language. What does it mean to be an Unicode engine? It means it expects your text to be written in Unicode (in fact, UTF-8). This gives you the ability to typeset any symbol or character you like, as far as it is available in the Unicode tables, and you have a font that is able to render that character.

This leads to a small problem. In fact, a problem that the main alternative (Microsoft Word) also have. You need to have the fonts installed in your system (or in the folder where your tex document is, or any other place where tex would search for include files). But this gives the ability to select any font, and any font for any language. I was able to typeset about 30 translations for “Good Morning”, including Arabic, Persian, Korean, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Urdu and others. Note that some of these languages are written right to left, other left to right. But as far as you are able to include the characters in your Unicode file, then with the correct fonts and some TeX packages, you will be able to typeset them.

If you want to give a try, look into fontspec and polyglossia packages for a start. Who knows if in the future I do not add another post with further details on how to use XeTeX.

Text::BibTeX 0.40 Released

Normally I do not post on every perl module I release. And that is good, or you will be feeling spammed.

Why this module is different?

Because I adopted Text::BibTeX a long time ago, and had a lot of complaints about its installation mechanism. This was mainly due to the fact that Text::BibTeX depended on a C library that needed to be installed prior to the perl module. The C library installation was easy on generic Unix platforms but was a pain to compile under Windows.

After lot of work I managed to include the library C code in the Perl module (now Text::BibTeX has no dependencies on the library), and managed to include code to compile the library in Windows, using the Strawberry Perl distribution (that includes a mingw C compiler).

The package is needing heavy tests, but it seems usable for most users. Probably I will post on the details about its build system in a later post.

LaTeX discussion list (in Portuguese)

Perl-hackers is now hosting a LaTeX mailing list for help and discussion on LaTeX. You can subscribe sending an email to latex-request@perl-hackers with ‘subscribe’ in the subject.