XeTeX 0.9999.0 released

Here is a mail from Khaled who is the current maintainer of XeTeX about a
new release which addresses a few problems faced by indic scripts. Hope
this will be useful to some of our users who rely on XeTeX.

Radhakrishnan
River Valley<https://maps.google.com/maps?q=River%20Valley,%20Thiruvananthapuram%20Neyyardam%20Road,%20Kerala,%20India&vector=1>

______________________________________
From: Khaled Hosny <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 4:56 AM
Subject: [MacTeX] XeTeX 0.9999.0 released
To: "MacOS X and TeX." <[email protected]>

Hi all,

I have just uploaded a beta release of 0.9999.x series.

The archive can be downloaded from SourceForge page:

        https://sourceforge.net/projects/xetex/files/source/

There have been quite some changes in this release, and testing is
highly appreciated, the more testing the better, but please note that
this is a beta release and should not be used in production
environments. There are no pre-built binaries right now, but they should
be available from TLContrib shortly.


Main changes in this release:

* Port OpenType layout from ICU LayoutEngine to HarfBuzz.
  HarfBuzz is actively maintained and generally have much wider support for
  OpenType spec, the switch fixes a number of OpenType bugs:
  - Support version 2 OpenType Indic specs.
  - Many other Indic OpenType bugs, and support for the latest additions to
    OpenType spec.
  - Incorrect application of contextual features.
  - Incorrect kerning in fonts that has both old “kern” table and new GPOS
    “kern” feature.
  - Allow suppressing Latin ligatures with ZWNJ.
  - Support for variation selectors.
  - Support for user-specified features with complex scripts.

* Port Graphite layout to from SilGraphite to HarfBuzz and Graphite2. Which
  provides a more robust Graphite support and also fixes a number of
Graphite
  bugs.

* Port AAT font layout and font searching on Mac from the deprecated
ATS/ATSUI
  to Core Text, and image support on Mac from QuickTime to ImageIO
framework.
  XeTeX can be finally built on 64-bit Mac! Work contributed by Jiang Jiang.

* Add “/OT” font variant, similar to “/ICU” which is now deprecated.

* Add a “shaper” font option to specify HarfBuzz shapers (for testing).

* Guessed script from input string if no one is given in the font
definition,
  instead of defaulting to Latin.

* Support 4-letter tags for Graphite features.

* Use \U prefix for extended math primitives, allowing XeTeX and LuaTeX to
use
  the same names for Unicode math primitives supported by both engines. The
old
  \XeTeX* primitives have been deprecated and will be removed in the future.

* Support OpenType math cut ins.

* Fix “\show” and “\meaning” of “\Umathchar” to a print a form that is legal
  input.

* Fix italic correction to not depend on space factor being zero for
OpenType
  fonts.

* Fix sporadic shifting of extensible accents.

* Fix typesetting XeTeX’s WEB code, in addition to various slight
improvements.

* Prefer TrueType/OpenType over Type1 fonts with the same font name.

* Support input pipes, in line with other engines.

* Drop support for using “()” as font names quotes since it was causing file
  names with parenthesis not to be found.

* Fix “\show” with characters outside BMP.

* Print the actual character instead of hex code for characters outside BMP
  with “\show”, “\meaning”, “\showlists” and missing char log messages.

* Fix letterspacing if zero width glyphs.

* Try to get cap and x height from OS/2 table first.

* Reject bitmap only fonts.

* Include build date in “--version” output.


Regards,
Khaled


P.S. Since I never announced the 0.9998 release (TeX Live 2012), I'm
posting the changes here for reference.

==============================================================
XeTeX 0.9998 was released 20120708
==============================================================

* Fix mismatch between fonts loaded by XeTeX and xdvipdfmx when multiple
  versions of the font exist.

* Fix “\the\textfont” with families > 15

* Extend “\fam” to accept family number up to 255.

* Fix build on Mac OS 10.7

OpenType math:

* Fix displacement of big operator's limits when “DisplayOperatorMinHeight”
is
  higher than the size of the big operator.

* Fix too wide accents over accentees that has sub/superscript.

* Support extensible accents for “\overbrace” etc.

* Always take math constants from current font, fixes multiple math
discrepancies.

* Honor relevant math constants when positioning sub/superscripts.

* Honor “AccentBaseHeight” when placing accents.

* Support “fixed” and “bottom” keywords in “\XeTeXmathaccent” for non
growing
  and bottom accents, respectively.

* Fix horizontal placement of of accents over single letters to honor their
top
  accent position value.

* Fix vertical placement of sub/superscripts of single letters to not be
  treated as non-single letters.

* Support proper positioning of nested accents.
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