Hi all, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
As subject. xdv is the eXtended DVi format used by XeTeX.
Actually, it can. LuaTeX produces DVI, which is perfectly palatable to XeTeX's xdv2pdf and xdvipdfmx. What features of xdv are you missing in LuaTeX's output?
As Barry said in another message, ToUnicode information would be useful. It is true that every DVI is also XDV, but not every XDV is DVI, and (some of) XeTeX's extensions would be nice to have if they can be integrated without too much effort. When it comes to new extensions, there already is at least one "Unicode-aware extended DVI format" commonly available, and that is ISO 32000, a.k.a. PDF 1.7. Note that from the user's point of view, a PDF is also what XeTeX generates. The backend conversion is hidden inside the executable. In the luatex engine, that already knows how to generate PDF on its own, there is no reason to go via DVI and (x)dvipdfmx to generate a PDF document. Also, the new PDF previewers like the one in texworks are fast enough to replace DVI previewers in interactive editing. Metapost is probably the last program that actually needs DVI for the label typesetting, and that dependency is already planned for removal. So the usefulness of DVI is limited and diminishing. In my opinion, it would therefore be a waste of effort to spend a lot of time working on an extension to the DVI backend. In fact, I advocate removing the whole possibility to create DVI output at some point in the future. Best wishes, Taco PS And a Happy New Year to you all!