Re: xetext-pdftex differences

["Mojca Miklavec" <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

On 4/11/07, Steffen Wolfrum <context@st.estfiles.de> wrote:
> Moica, thanks for your detailed support!
>
> On Tue, 10 Apr 2007 21:27:47 +0200, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> >> Where do I go when I experience differences between context/pdftext
> >> and context/xetex?
> >
> > What do you mean?
>
> these:
>
> >> For example with context/xetex I get ...
> >>
> >> ! Undefined control sequence.
> >> \stopframedtext ->\dostopframedtext
> >
> ...
> >> ... and I do get "SS" instead of eszett ("ß") with the following:
> >
> > Interesting effect ... (as if the encoding was unknown)
>
>
> I have to admit that it I never understood which encoding to use when....

Me neither. Until I figured out that some of my letters were missing
in texnansi. texnansi & ec are 8-bit encodings used by "old" TeX
(pdfTeX) and only support 256 different characters. (you need to use a
different encodings for greek, cyrillic, vietnamese, ...)

The main problem is that XeTeX is not really backward compatible in
that respect: old fonts don't work since XeTeX thinks that the glyphs
are unicode-encoded, but they're in ec/texnansi/whatever other
encoding. If it nevertheless works, that is by a pure coincidence
(when you only need English letters ...).
In case that you would want to get the old fonts working with XeTeX,
you need to ask Jonathan. He said that it might be implemented, but
it's not really high on the priority list (it's just a problem during
transition state when 8'bit fonts still dominate in the TeX world).

LuaTeX will probably support those old encodings, but you would want
to use "uc" (unicode) encoding for both engines, otherwise it makes no
sense to use XeTeX instead of pdfTeX at all.

> if, for example, I just write english/german/french then I could also use texnansi, this works perfect :
>
> \usetypescriptfile[type-gyr]
> \usetypescript[times][texnansi]
> \mainlanguage[de]
> \enableregime[utf]
>
> \setupbodyfont[times,9pt]

That's because texnansi is based on "ansi" in the upper half of the
table and unicode is "by accident" the same in that area. So it's
really "coincedence" that it works. You should not use it that way
unless you have no better choice.

> > Which version of ConTeXt? It works OK here with 2007.03.22, but I need
> > to try the new beta. In principle this should not happen, it's
> > probably a bug or some other local problem.
>
> it is version 2007.01.12 (didn't you recommend to stay with the january version?)

It depends on what you want to do. The current version is indeed not
stable in that respect.

>
> >> Whom to tell this?
> >
> > Mailing list is the perfect place.
>
>
> I was wondering whether the xetex or the context list is better as it is a mixed xetex/context-topic
> and for Adam is in "paternity leave" I had no idea on which list someone continues.

All of your questions mentioned here belong to the ConTeXt mailing
list (XeTeX mailing list is mostly for XeLaTeX and low-level XeTeX
discussions) since it's really about the ConTeXt user-interface. The
only thing you could ask for on the XeTeX list is the question of
supporting ec/texnansi-encoded fonts (I prefer to wait for luaTeX than
to bother about those "soon-to-become-obsolete" additions).

>
> > At the beginning I had problems with XeTeX as well since Times
> > resolved to 'Times Roman:mapping=tex-text', which resolved to the name
> > 'mapping=tex-text' (a side effect of recent that should probably be
> > fixed somehow in the near future), but that problem disappeared later.
> > I had to temporary fix this (leftovers before TeXGyre family managed
> > to overload everything perhaps?):
>
>
> right, "Times Roman:mapping=tex-text": This also happened to me when using ...
>
> \usetypescriptfile[type-gyr]
> \usetypescript[times][uc]
>
> ... that's why I used ...
>
> \usetypescriptfile[type-gyr]
> \usetypescript[times][ec]
>
>
> ... but probably I should have used "texnansi" (see above).

You should try to get "uc" working if possible, but you need to add
some definitions from my previous mail. If you want to stick with
texnansi, you should better use pdfTeX.

Mojca