In a couple of hours, an interview with Khaled Hosny! :)

Everyone just about ready?

@JosephWright Here I am.

@egreg Yes, we seem to be currently missing an interviewee

@JosephWright I see his avatar.

@egreg Ah yes

Hello @KhaledHosny

Friends, are we about ready to go?

We're waiting for our official interviewer to start.

@egreg Ok, @PauloCereda is busy so I guess that's me

@KhaledHosny What first led you to the TeX world?

(The usual starter question)

(Note: Questions and answers get edited into a sensible order later)

@KhaledHosny Can you also tell something about you?

Hi all, sorry had brief power outage just when I logged in :)

@KhaledHosny No problem

@KhaledHosny These things are quite flexible :-)

... and, please, about the symbol in your avatar?

Hello @KhaledHosny I'd like to thank you for the latest XeTeX release and ask your plans for future XeTeX releases (assuming there will be some)

@JosephWright: I don’t recall for sure, but I probably was looking for a free software typesetting solution and found Scribus bit was disappointed with its lake of Arabic support, then learnt about XeTeX but was again disappointed with the very limited TeX--XeT bidirectional model (and its broken handling of specials) and then learnt about LuaTeX and immediately fell into love with it :)

@KhaledHosny Ah, the son of Omega :-)

(All: ask away!)

@KhaledHosny But does LuaTeX have bidi support yet?

@KhaledHosny: How many hours do you spend per week, on average, on TeX-related programming work?

@egreg I’m an 28 years old Egyptian, and physician by education (but stopped practising medicine just after graduation). I enjoy free software and thanks to it I currently make a living as a software developer and a font “engineer”.

@KhaledHosny The latest work on XeTeX must have taken many hours of coding, I guess --- just getting familiar with the source code must have been quite challenging?

@KhaledHosny But you went back to XeTeX ...

@Papiro: That is the first letter of my name, [Kh]aled, written in Arabic script (Nastaliq style of calligraphy). Without the dot it is the first letter of my father’s name, [H]osny, so it serves a double duty as my initials :)

@KhaledHosny Nice! Thanks!

@KhaledHosny You seem pretty involved in XeTeX and LuaTeX development; what are your plans? Making them more compatible with each other?

@GrahamDouglas nothing big is planned. This year the indefatigable Peter Breitenlohner is continuing his work on merging xdvipdfmx back into dvipdfmx (that both are maintained by TeX Live team now) and I’ll be helping a bit. Apart from that I’ll try to fix some of the bugs I introduced in the previous two releases.

@KhaledHosny Worth knowing :-)

@AlanMunn LuaTeX had an excellent multidirectional typesetting model from the start (inherited from Omega), but macro packages support for it is variable (LaTeX support is mostly missing). But I don’t use LaTeX for my typesetting work, I use ConTeXt and for bidi support I use an implementation of the Unicode bidirectional algorithm I wrote in Lua (can be found here github.com/khaledhosny/context-bidi).

@KhaledHosny Documentation is a bit lacking in both XeTeX and LuaTeX, I've found, on the bidi stuff :-)

@GrahamDouglas it varies greatly, sometimes I spend weeks working continually on TeX-related stuff, sometimes I spend months without doing anything TeX at all. But generally I get bored quickly, so I switch between different things often, unless I’m doing something very interesting and having success with it.

@KhaledHosny: A dream would be a CMake-based build of XeTeX to compile it via Visual Studio... I've built the original TeX like (from WEB source) that but have yet to try LuaTeX or XeTeX. It would be wonderful to single-step through the code via the MS IDE :-)

@GrahamDouglas I think Jonathan Kew writes good code, because I don’t recall taking too much time getting on with the code, and fortunately I don’t often need to hack on the WEB side of things and that do take time (and most of the bugs I introduced are there).

@JosephWright No, not really. I still rarely use XeTeX myself, since its bidi support is quite limiting (actually I used it only once since I started hacking on it, because the font I wanted to use has many bugs with the font layout code currently used, and I then had to give up on colors and hyperlinks!)

@KhaledHosny Yes, that's certainly fair (although people can and do use bibi in XeTeX and even pdfTeX)

@egreg I have a secret plan (I didn’t tell you this ;)) that would bring some of the niceties of XeTeX (mainly font support) to LuaTeX, but no concrete plan yet.

@KhaledHosny Not such a bad plan, if the LuaTeX people will go for it

@KhaledHosny I was just hoping. ;-)

@KhaledHosny Hey, that sounds wonderful: XeTeX font handling with LuaTeX's access to internals etc. Sounds like DreamTeX :-)

Sorry, I'm late. Thanks @JosephWright for covering my absence, thanks @KhaledHosny for being so kind in accepting being interviewed, and everyone else for joining us today! :)

@JosephWright That documentation is an issue indeed, but for TeX--XeT you can allways refer to Knuth’s initial article since little (on the interface side) has changed since then, on LuaTeX side things are not finalised yet to be formally documented, but there was a draft Omega manual that once covered the basics of its directional support.

@KhaledHosny Yes, I know having dug around quite a bit! Still to do some L3 code on this ...

@KhaledHosny Has changing font shaper in XeTeX been an easy process? Any big issues it's raised?

@GrahamDouglas I’m not an expert in build systems, but I usually stick to autotools because it is the most mature solution on free software system, but it does not play nice with MS stuff. XeTeX build scripts are maintained by TeX Live team of course (mainly Peter), there is no way I can do all that magic myself :)

@KhaledHosny: What's missing for XeTeX 1.0?

@JosephWright The L3 team needs somebody who knows about languages that are written right to left. ;-)

@JosephWright My plan is to embrace LuaTeX binary loadable modules, to stay true to LuaTeX’s general design of not enforcing any particular solution.

(wow, you guys are so technical, I have no idea what to ask) :)

@KhaledHosny: Can you shed some light on the current situation in egypt?

@PauloCereda was my last question un-technical enough? :-)

@MartinSchröder :P

@JosephWright Nothing big. HarfBuzz was missing few features, but its maintainer, Behdad Esfahbod, was kind enough to added whatever I asked for. Most of time I was removing more code than writing new one, which is what I do best not being a good software developer myself.

@KhaledHosny @KhaledHosny do you mean binary modules (ie DLLs on Windows) that are loadable via Lua's require() command?

@MartinSchröder No idea, I try not to release 1.x software as long as I can :)

@KhaledHosny: sorry for this newbie question: I always wondered if, with the new and exciting features made possible with LuaTeX and XeTeX, these engines should be the starting point for teaching TeX/LaTeX instead of the "traditional" approaches (latex and pdflatex). Do you think a newbie tutorial could make use of them right out of the box?

@JosephWright I met few issues with FreeType and bridging Core Text API with FreeType was a bit of challenge, and I’m still not happy with the solution I’m using now.

@GrahamDouglas Yes

@MartinSchröder Things are complex :)

@KhaledHosny Yes. :-)

@KhaledHosny: IIRC last year you announced that you would be offline for quite some time because of military duty. Then you where online again not so much later. What happened? The revolution?

@PauloCereda With my font “engineer”/Unicode hat on, I think it is time for 8-bit TeX to retire, and newcomers to TeX should definitely be introduced to modern TeX engines.

@KhaledHosny: How did you find out about tex.se?

@MartinSchröder My conscription was after the revolution (and it was two years ago, in 2011). I broke my leg in the boot camp (badly) and spent the rest of the year on medical leave until I was dismissed for my medical condition.

@MartinSchröder someone wrote about it on comp.text.tex

@KhaledHosny Sorry to hear. How are you going now?

@KhaledHosny: Are XeTeX or LuaTeX widely used in Egypt or other Arabic-speaking countries --- due to the ability to typeset Arabic to a good standard?

@KhaledHosny, @PauloCereda -- re 8-bit engines, some of us are trying to keep production systems running smoothly, and until it's certain that the unicode-based systems are fully stable and have completely reliable math support, it's rather optimistic to consider a switch now. even after the engines are totally stable, it'll take a year or more to transition.

@KhaledHosny -- for the question part, taco hasn't said that luatex is fully stable yet, not even to the point of beginning to test an upgrade. how much longer before that happens?

@egreg Thank you. It took a bit to recover (and a couple of surgeries :)), but things are better now.

@GrahamDouglas I don’t think TeX in general is that well known around here, even in mostly English academic fields.

@barbarabeeton but you are not a newbie, and you can certainly handle encoding issues very wells and I don’t think your font needs changed that much since the 80s. Not everyone is like that :)

@KhaledHosny: could you name something you like in XeTeX and LuaTeX? And something you don't like?

@KhaledHosny -- but many of our authors are relative newbies, who nonetheless try to "show off", and define everything for themselves, sometimes causing complete havoc when we try to run their files through the production system. so, sadly, we too frequently have to rekey submissions; adds to the cost, and introduces new errors. (now, if they'd only read the instructions, ...)

@PauloCereda I like the font support of XeTeX and the bidirectional support of LuaTeX, and don’t like the bidirectional support of XeTeX and the font support of LuaTeX.

@barbarabeeton: Hi there. I've worked in (physics) journal production/submission systems -- I completely hear what you are saying!!

@KhaledHosny Sounds about right to me ;-)

@KhaledHosny What do you like, and don't, in TeX.SX?

@egreg I like the QA format of the site and the nice TeX people, I can’t think of something I do not like.

@KhaledHosny: do you have a favourite answer of yours in this site?

@PauloCereda too many to name just one

@KhaledHosny :)

@KhaledHosny Please talk about your hobbies I

@KhaledHosny not TeX related :-)

@KhaledHosny: Any hints for a newbie eager to learn about TeX and friends? :)

@Papiro I enjoy reading, reading just about anything. I used to draw and do Arabic calligraphy (self-taught in both cases), but not much these days. I enjoy doing manual work and fixing things in general. But since I was introduced to computers 7 or 8 years ago, I have been spending most of my time playing with software.

@PauloCereda I’m not good at giving hints, but if someone asked me I’m likely to give him a general “read and practice” advice.

@KhaledHosny Thanks! What about trips? Are you invited to talk about your TeX related work?

@KhaledHosny: I have to go now so I'd like to say thanks again for the latest XeTeX releases which compile nicely under Windows. Keep up the fantastic work and very best wishes to you and for a long-lasting peace to come to Egypt --- a country I've visited several times and loved it more each time.

@Papiro I got invited several times, but couldn’t attend for various reasons. I’m yet to attend a TeX conference or meet any of the nice TeX people (actually I never left Egypt so far).

@GrahamDouglas Thank you.

Friends, any more questions? :)

@GrahamDouglas BTW, I follow your blog and I enjoy your posts :)

@KhaledHosny: Thank you very much for this awesome interview!

(Friends, feel free to post questions, we usually wait a couple of days and then "close" the interview) :)

@KhaledHosny Thank you. Best wishes!

@KhaledHosny -- it was originally proposed that this year's tug meeting be held in cairo. i hope that this will be possible sometime in the future, while i'm still around to participate. thanks for your contributions to tex/fonts/everything else that goes along with it.

Thanks for the interview, and thanks to everyone for their questions, I enjoyed it.

:)

@barbarabeeton I think that was 2011’s and I really missed it.

@KhaledHosny Thanks a lot for your contributions to TeX world especially in arabic font world and being an active contributor to tex.sx