XeTeX ( or ; see also Pronouncing and writing "TeX") is a

TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

typesetting engine using

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

and supporting modern font technologies such as

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...

Graphite Graphite () is a crystalline form of the element carbon. It consists of stacked layers of graphene. Graphite occurs naturally and is the most stable form of carbon under standard conditions. Synthetic and natural graphite are consumed on large ...

and

Apple Advanced Typography Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) is Apple Inc.'s computer technology for advanced font rendering, supporting internationalization and complex features for typographers, a successor to Apple's little-used QuickDraw GX font technology of the mid-1 ...

(AAT). It was originally written by Jonathan Kew and is distributed under the X11 free software license. Initially developed for

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

only, it is now available for all major platforms. It natively supports Unicode and the input file is assumed to be in

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit'' ...

encoding by default. XeTeX can use any fonts installed in the operating system without configuring

TeX font metric TeX font metric (TFM) is a typeface, font file format used by the TeX typesetting system. It is a font metric format, not an outline font format like TrueType, because it provides only the information necessary to typeset the font such as each ch ...

s, and can make direct use of advanced typographic features of

, AAT and

technologies such as alternative

glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

s and swashes, optional or historic ligatures, and variable font weights. Support for OpenType local typographic conventions (locl tag) is also present. XeTeX even allows raw OpenType feature tags to be passed to the font.

Microtypography Microtypography is a range of methods for improving the readability and appearance of text, especially justified text. The methods reduce the appearance of large interword spaces and create edges to the text that appear more even. Microtypograp ...

is also supported. XeTeX also supports typesetting mathematics using Unicode fonts that contain special mathematical features, such as

Cambria Math Cambria is a transitional serif typeface commissioned by Microsoft and distributed with Windows and Office. It was designed by Dutch typeface designer Jelle Bosma in 2004, with input from Steve Matteson and Robin Nicholas. It is intended as a ser ...

or Asana Math as an alternative to the traditional mathematical typesetting based on TeX font metrics.

Mode of operation

XeTeX processes input in two stages. In the first stage XeTeX outputs an

extended DVI The device independent file format (DVI) is the output file format of the TeX typesetting program, designed by David R. Fuchs and implemented by Donald E. Knuth in 1982. Unlike the TeX markup files used to generate them, DVI files are not inte ...

(xdv) file, which is then converted to

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

by a driver. In the default operating mode the xdv output is piped directly to the driver without producing any user-visible intermediate files. It is possible to run just the first stage of XeTeX and save the xdv, although there are no viewers capable of displaying the intermediate format. Two backend drivers are available to generate PDF from an xdv file: * xdv2pdf, which uses

ATSUI The Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging (ATSUI) is the set of services for rendering Unicode-encoded text introduced in Mac OS 8.5 and carried forward into Mac OS X. It replaced the WorldScript engine for legacy encodings. Obsolescence ...

and QuickTime frameworks, and only works on

. * xdvipdfmx, a modified version of

dvipdfmx The device independent file format (DVI) is the output file format of the TeX typesetting program, designed by David R. Fuchs and implemented by Donald E. Knuth in 1982. Unlike the TeX markup files used to generate them, DVI files are not inte ...

, which uses FreeType. This driver works on all platforms. Starting from version 0.997, the default driver is xdvipdfmx on all platforms. As of version 0.9999, xdv2pdf is no longer supported and its development has been discontinued. XeTeX works well with both

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

and

ConTeXt Context may refer to: * Context (language use), the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation, and discourse summary Computing * Context (computing), the virtual environment required to su ...

macro packages. Its LaTeX counterpart is invoked as xelatex. It is usually used with the fontspec package, which provides a configurable interface for font selection, and allows complex font choices to be named and later reused. XeTeX is bundled with

TeX Live TeX Live is a cross-platform, free software distribution for the TeX typesetting system that includes major TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts. It is the replacement of its no-longer supported counterpart teTeX. It is now the def ...

MacTeX MacTeX is a free redistribution of TeX Live, a typesetting environment based on TeX. While TeX Live is designed to be cross-platform (running on Unix, macOS, and Windows), MacTeX includes Mac-specific utilities and front-ends (such as TeXShop an ...

MiKTeX MiKTeX is a free and open-source distribution of the TeX/LaTeX typesetting system for Microsoft Windows (and for Mac and certain Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora). It also contains a set of related programs. MiKTeX provides ...

and

Lyx LyX (styled as ; pronounced ) (Based on 3 developers, they say it can be pronounced "Licks", "Lucks" and "Leeks") is an open source, graphical user interface document processor based on the LaTeX typesetting system. Unlike most word processors, ...

(see the

History History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the History of writing#Inventions of writing, invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbr ...

below for dates and versions).

Example

The following is an example of XeLaTeX source and rendered output. The typeface used is OFL-licensed font

Linux Libertine Linux Libertine is a digital typeface created by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create free and open alternatives to proprietary typefaces such as Times New Roman. It is developed with the free font editor FontForge and is licen ...

. The text is to be processed by the command xelatex.

Arabic support

XeTeX also supports

right-to-left In a script (commonly shortened to right to left or abbreviated RTL, RL-TB or R2L), writing starts from the right of the page and continues to the left, proceeding from top to bottom for new lines. Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Pashto, Urdu, Kashmir ...

scripts, such as

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...

. One way of rendering Arabic in XeTeX is to use the package arabxetex. In order to do so, the Arabic is placed inside the following: \begin tf. . . \end The following code illustrates this:

Features

In bibliographic files (see below the BibTeX example) you can use Unicode entities and call them with their native scripting, for example \cite, instead of a transliterated ASCII form like \cite which is mandatory using the

pdfTeX __NOTOC__ The computer program pdfTeX is an extension of Knuth's typesetting program TeX, and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product by Hàn Thế Thành as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of In ...

engine. % Encoding: UTF8 @ARTICLE(Ekstrom, AUTHOR = "Author w", TITLE = "", JOURNAL = "Ekstrm Journal", YEAR = 1965, note = ) @ARTICLE(Ekstrøm, AUTHOR = "Author Ekstrm", TITLE = "", JOURNAL = "Ekstrøm Journal", YEAR = "1965", note = )

History

XeTeX was initially released for

only in April 2004 with built-in AAT and

support. In 2005 support for OpenType layout features was first introduced. During BachoTeX 2006 a version for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

was announced, which was ported to

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

by Akira Kakuto a few months later, and finally included into

2007 for all major platforms. XeTeX is also supported by

LyX LyX (styled as ; pronounced ) (Based on 3 developers, they say it can be pronounced "Licks", "Lucks" and "Leeks") is an open source, graphical user interface document processor based on the LaTeX typesetting system. Unlike most word processors, ...

since version 2.0 and shipped with

since version 2.7. As of the inclusion in

, XeTeX supports most macro packages written for

TrueType TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating sy ...

and

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

fonts without any specific setup procedure. Version 0.998 announced at BachoTeX 2008 supports

Unicode normalization Unicode equivalence is the specification by the Unicode character encoding standard that some sequences of code points represent essentially the same character. This feature was introduced in the standard to allow compatibility with preexisting s ...

via the \XeTeXinputnormalization command. Version 0.9999, released in May 2013, switched from ICU Layout Engine to

HarfBuzz HarfBuzz (loose transliteration of Persian calque ''harf-bāz'', literally "open type") is a software development library for text shaping, which is the process of converting Unicode text to glyph indices and positions. The newer version, ''N ...

for

layout, and Graphite2 engine for

layout, as well

Core Text Core Text is a Core Foundation style API in macOS, first introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, made public in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and introduced for the iPad with iPhone SDK 3.2. Exposing a C API, it replaces the text rendering abilities of t ...

framework instead of

on Mac OS X.

Mode of operation

Example

Arabic support

Features

History

See also

References

Further reading

External links