Hi Oleg, On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 12:30 PM, Oleg Parashchenko <o...@uucode.com> wrote: >> If I had to guess I would say that xdv2pdf is dead and there will be no >> more work done on it. > > Pity. Any ideas why it has happended? Does xdv2pdf have some fatal flaws, > or does it a normal produciton-quality driver, which just lost competition > to xdvipdfmx? > > For my work, the use of MAC OS X PDF-generation API is an important > feature, which I'd like to try to use. But first, I want to be sure that > I'm not betting on a wrong horse.
I think Jonathan has explained it a few times on this list: - xdv2pdf was originally designed to support AAT fonts and Mac OS X specific features, but even Apple has started dropping AAT fonts in Mac OS X and support OpenType, so it makes less sense to continue developing xdv2pdf - XeTeX leverages ICU/FreeType to handle OpenType font loading and layout on all platforms, using xdvipdfmx will make sure the PDF output step is unified with other platforms, otherwise xdv2pdf has to be extended to support ICU/FreeType - xdv2pdf generates larger and more redundant PDF files, while the output of xdvipdfmx is smaller and more compact (AFAIK, it's the best PDF driver in TeX world, even better than pdfTeX) - Most xdv2pdf specific features like graphics inclusion are well handled in xdvipdfmx now. To summarize, the only reason to continue using xdv2pdf is probably when you have to use AAT fonts. - Jiang -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
