UK TeX FAQ -- question label xetex

### XeTeX

XeTeX, by Jonathan Kew, is a successor to the shareware TeX/GX program for Macintoshes. It was developed as a WEB ‘change file’ applied to the original source of TeX; the main changes include:

The input stage
  XeTeX by default reads Unicode (UTF-8, for instance), although it’s also capable of interpreting differently encoded files (for backwards compatibility). Multibyte characters are reduced to a single internal character upon reading, so they are considered as a unique entity when tokenization is performed. (So, for example, you can have command names in cyrillic, if you must, but such a practice is not recommended.)
The font management
  a substantial revision has added support for OpenType and TrueType fonts, delegating some parts to third-party libraries.
The maths font set up
  XeTeX introduces new primitives for extending the `\``mathcode` and `\``mathchardef` commands in TeX, allowing the user to specify characters in the whole Unicode set and in 256 ‘math families’ (TeX only has 16, which limits some maths coding techniques).
“Post-processing” features (A)
  XeTeX links to the teckit library so it can apply a `.map` file that allows transformation of characters in already formed token lists, before they are processed in the “stomach” for typesetting. In this way, a declaration “`Ligatures=TeX`” is provided, which attaches a map directive to the font that transforms the character combinations (familiar to TeX users) into a single character; for instance `-{`--} is transformed into “\textemdash”.
“Post-processing” features (B)
  Characters can be assigned to an “interchar token class” and it is possible to specify tokens to be added when there is a transition from one class to another. The packages polyglossia, xeCJK and ucharclasses exploit this feature.

Otherwise, the process of typesetting is essentially the same as TeX’s. (However some changes have also been made in the hyphenation stage that may give slightly different results if the same document is compiled with PDFTeX or XeTeX.)

`polyglossia.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/polyglossia (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
`xeCJK.sty`
  macros/xetex/latex/xecjk (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
`ucharclasses.sty`
  macros/xetex/latex/ucharclasses (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

This answer last edited: 2013-02-21

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