do-it-yourself-tex – Back to Plain XeTeX

This package provides a collection of easily modifiable forms, macros and sample texts for use with plain TeX/XeTeX.

Plain TeX, as demonstrated by the myriad of articles and books dating from before the advent of LaTeX, is capable of producing fine typography. It has the advantage of not being as obscure as far as macros, font designation etc. are concerned, and this package is intended to be another contribution to the repertoire in terms of macros, forms and examples.

XeTeX, which works without the necessity of further manipulation of classical TeX documents, has the further advantage of understanding Unicode, for which many open source fonts are available. In additon, XeTeX’s immediate output is an extended variant of DVI format, which is ordinarily processed by a tightly bound processor (called xdvipdfmx) that produces PDF, i.e. if you type: xetex file_01.tex, you obtain: file_01.pdf.

This package provides easily modifiable forms and macros which illustrate how plain XeTeX can be used to produce high quality texts with such features as precise font designations, imported images, marginal notes, colour, right to left texts and syllabics. Real examples are provided in both the TeX and PDF versions. A set of shell files, font tables, and an HTML page with links to font sources are also provided.

Download the contents of this package in one zip archive (7.3M).