feature request: external figures with XeTeX

feature request: external figures with XeTeX

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hello Hans,

Would it be possible to add high-level support (\externalfigure) for
inclusion of external figures in XeTeX? (I didn't know that it worked
- I remember a failed experiment from some time ago, but it might have
been my fault.)

There are two commands:
   \XeTeXpdffile <filename> <optional options> for PDF (supporting
inclusion of different pages)
   \XeTeXpicfile <filename> <optional options> for "everything else"

So for example this should work:
   \XeTeXpicfile "abc.png" width 8cm (or  xscaled 1000 yscaled 2000 for example)
(However I don't know which all the available options are.)

Thank you,
    Mojca

Re: feature request: external figures with XeTeX

[Ricard Roca]

Hi,

I think \externalfigure support is the only \special feature that still 
doesn't work with XeTeX. It seems that color, paper sizes and pdf interaction 
work well. This is not a big problem, because you can use \XeTeXpicfile (for 
jpg, png and bmp) and \XeTeXpdffile (you can specify width, scale, angle, 
etc., and with pdf files, the page). The documentation is in the file 
XeTeX-notes.pdf, available with the Mac OS X XeTeX package (available options 
are 'width', 'height', 'scaled', 'xscaled', 'yscaled', 'rotated', and 'page' 
for pdf files). So you can do all the normal graphic manipulations without 
knowing box dimensions, etc., like with \externalfigure.

But their syntax is a bit strange from the conTeXt point of view (too TeXy), 
and it would be nice to use the same syntax than with pdfTeX input.

Thanks,

Ricard