9

The LaTeX3 source contains a folder xor which contains, among other things, xo-grid, which is supposed to provide LaTeX3 with grid support. To quote Joseph Wright,

Getting to grips with xor is one of the biggest challenges facing the LaTeX3 Project: the code is complex and has evolved over many years. As such, there is currently no good estimate of when it will be production ready. It's also worth noting that the code will almost certainly break any LaTeX2e package that relies on the LaTeX2e output routine.

However, I was unable to find good documentation about what exactly xoris. I suspect that the or might stand for "output routine", but that does not help much. What exactly is xor?

Community
  • 1
Gaussler
  • 12,801
  • 1
    You should join the L3 - Team to get more information ;-) As far as I understand it, the xor implementation is not meant for production code so far (i.e. usage in documents) –  May 23 '15 at 09:22
  • I don't think I have much to offer them in terms of TeX knowledge. ;-) – Gaussler May 23 '15 at 09:23
  • 1
    See this for or http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8212/an-explanation-of-latexs-output-routine and x is the typical way to mention a difference or a new feature such as package names graphicx,xparse,xstring and so on. – percusse May 23 '15 at 09:25
  • Frank wrote about the original implementation of xor in his 2000 paper: http://latex-project.org/papers/xo-pfloat.pdf . I believe the code has changed substantially since then (updated for expl3), but otherwise the ideas are still relevant. – Will Robertson May 28 '15 at 06:22

1 Answers1

9

Currently, xor does not go to CTAN as it is far too experimental for general use. As such, beyond the team and highly interested developers there is not an 'audience' for the code and as such not a need to provide detailed documentation.

As the name indicates, xor is an eXperimental Output Routine for LaTeX (LaTeX3). It is a completely different implementation to the LaTeX2e OR, and importantly handles floats in an entirely different way. The design brief for xor is that it should allow fine control of float placement in multiple columns, grid typesetting, clear tracing information, etc. To do that, it breaks essentially any LaTeX2e code related to output!

At present, xor does work in the sense one can load it and produce a document. However, there are lots of parts of the code that need revision: it's been around in some form since the late 1990s at least. Parts of it need logic revision, parts need 'good practice' revision, parts need documentation, ...

Joseph Wright
  • 259,911
  • 34
  • 706
  • 1,036
  • If this x naming scheme is all about being experimental, is latex just one big and very late experiment? :-) – Gaussler May 23 '15 at 09:44
  • So if I add xor to my TeX library, a very minimal LaTeX2e document loading it would work? – Gaussler May 23 '15 at 10:25
  • 1
    @Gaussler As you'll see in the demo files that are part of xor, it will work with a 'vanilla' document. – Joseph Wright May 23 '15 at 10:34
  • 1
    Thanks for your answers :-). And xo-grid? Has it become more usable since this question was asked? http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/104035/19809 – Gaussler May 25 '15 at 11:54