In parallel with work on the \expanded primitive, I’ve been working recently on bringing the ‘utility’ primitives in XeTeX into line with those in pdfTeX, pTeX and upTeX.

Background

XeTeX was written to extend e-TeX to allow full Unicode working, including loading system fonts. The development started from the DVI-mode e-TeX, rather than from pdfTeX, which had added various new primitives to e-TeX. Much of the difference between pdfTeX and e-TeX is directly to do with producing PDF output, but there are some additions that are entirely independent of that.

Over the years, some of the ‘utilities’ have been added to XeTeX (for example \pdfstrcmp, which in XeTeX is just \strcmp). However, several have not made it, but have been added to pTeX and upTeX. That’s meant that XeTeX has between ‘a bit behind’ in feature terms: there are things that simply can’t be done without primitive support.

An opportunity arises

As I’ve said in my other post today, the recent setting up of a Travis-CI testing environment for TeX Live building means that it is now easy to try adding new material to the WEB sources of pdfTeX, XeTeX, etc. As I was working on \expanded anyway, I decided that I’d look at bringing XeTeX back ‘into line’ with pTeX and upTeX. That’s important as for expl3, the LaTeX team have been using almost all of the primitives that were ‘missing’ in XeTeX.

The new features

So what has been added? The new additions are all named without the pdf part that pdfTeX includes, as they have nothing to do with PDFs:

  • \creationdate
  • \elaspsedtime
  • \filedump
  • \filemoddate
  • \filesize
  • \resettimer
  • \normaldeviate
  • \uniformdeviate
  • \randomseed

These enable things like random numbers in the LaTeX3 FPU, measuring code performance and checking the details of files: all stuff that is in expl3 and will now work with XeTeX.

I should add that although I did the grind of working out how to integrate the pdfTeX code into XeTeX, Akira Kakuto sorted out the areas that needed knowledge of C, in particular where XeTeX’s Unicode internals don’t match up with pdfTeX’s 8-bit ones.

One more thing

As well as the above, I made one other minor adjustment to XeTeX: altering how \Ucharcat works so it can create category code 13 (‘active’) tokens. That probably won’t show up for users except it helps the team extend some low-level expl3 code. Hopefully it will mean there is on fewer XeTeX restriction.

Getting the code

TeX Live only gets binary updates once per year, so users there will need to wait for the 2019 release. On the other hand, MiKTeX already has the new features, so if you are on Windows it’s pretty trivial to try out. If you use TeX Live and really want to test out, you can update your binaries in-place, for example from W32TeX: if you understand what that means, you probably know how to do it!