[Dev-luatex] Q: Can LuaTeX produce xdv?

[Barry Schwartz]

Jonathan Fine <jfine at pytex.org> skribis:
> But DVI lacks an essential feature of TeX, which is the TeX macro language. 
>  I count this as a benefit of DVI, not a deficiency. Standards restrict, 
> and by restricting enable.

This may be a case of 'If you build it, they will come': present a set
of tools making XDVI useful, and then maybe people will want to write
code for it.

Having written the clumsy XDVI support for ant (ant.berlios.de) a few
years ago, and somewhat less clumsy support for unpublished software,
I am trying to recall in what important ways XDVI differs from regular
DVI. I _think_ (my memory may be wrong) the deal was that to use a
non-tfm font you had to use the new glyph-writing opcodes. Otherwise
it's almost exactly like using dvipdfm.

I don't know what XeTeX does but in both the cases mentioned above I
use glyph-index encoding. To make that portable you would have to
include in the xdv file a map from glyph indexes to Unicode strings,
perhaps using specials.