I'm just finishing up a project that involved typesetting text in
several languages, while outputting an XML file that defined in X/Y
coordinates the position and size of the bounding box surrounding each
line of text in the PDF. I used Luatex, because that made it possible
to call Lua from Luatex using the \directlua{} command) to pass
information to Lua, and to return information from Lua to Luatex using
tex.print(). I also used Lua to write the XML file.
Too late, I discovered that LuaTeX botches the rendering of one of the
languages, Tamil. Tamil has a complex script, with some typical Indic
script features; so presumably LuaTeX would also mess up on other
languages with complex scripts. XeTeX of course does just fine at
rendering text in complex scripts.
As I say, it's too late to change now, but is there any way I could have
done something similar using xetex? That is, called another programming
language to output box positions and sizes. I suppose it's possible to
write to an XML file in xetex natively, but I'm not sure how I could get
the positions and sizes of boxes. My style sheet defines a command,
\outputpara{}, that requires the user to specify the X-position of the
paragraph, and hence of lines in the paragraph, where line breaks are of
course decided on the fly. The command optionally specifies the
Y-position of the paragraph, but the Y-position of each line in the
paragraph--except the first--is determined by the usual TeX algorithms.
Getting TeX to tell me those Y-positions, as well as the vertical size
of the box, was the difficult part. But maybe I was missing something
obvious?
Mike Maxwell
University of Maryland
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