XETEX-UNSAFE(1)

💖 XETEX-UNSAFE 💖

okay so this lives in the General Commands Manual 📚 and it's all about running xe(la)latex unsafely 😭 so read the warnings, bestie!!

✨ NAME ✨

xetex-unsafe, xelatex-unsafe — run xe(la)latex unsafely 🦋

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

xetex-unsafe [xetex-options] xelatex-unsafe [xetex-options]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so xetex-unsafe (or xelatex-unsafe) runs XeTeX (or XeLaTeX) unsafely 🔥 specifically, it uses the dvipdfmx-unsafe.cfg config file to do it 💅

as of TeX Live 2022, you only need this when you're running XeTeX on documents that use PSTricks features needing transparency 🧚 and ngl, we strongly recommend using Lua(La)TeX with PSTricks instead of XeTeX in this case 💜

At all costs, avoid using this, or any, unsafe invocation with documents off the net or that are otherwise untrusted in any way. 💀 no cap, do not run random internet files like this!!

🤔 WHY? 🤔

okay bestie, you might be wondering why transparency is unsafe in XeTeX 🙈 the tea is in the history of Ghostscript 🍓 it started as a PostScript interpreter before PDF existed, and back then it was fine to just abort on an error ✨ but with PDF, it has to keep going no matter what 😭 the transparency operators, if you abuse them around that error recovery, can cause internal inconsistencies in Ghostscript's state 💀

so, to be safe, transparency is disallowed with Ghostscript by default 🛡️ the xdvipdfmx backend for XeTeX calls Ghostscript in certain situations, especially with PSTricks 🌈 and (x)dvipdfmx itself is not a PostScript interpreter, which is exactly what PSTricks needs 🫶

so to turn transparency on, xe(la)tex-unsafe runs XeTeX with arguments for the xdvipdfmx backend: -output-driver="xdvipdfmx -i dvipdfmx-unsafe.cfg -q -E" 🎀 that makes it use dvipdfmx-unsafe.cfg, which tells Ghostscript to enable the transparency operators with -dALLOWPSTRANSPARENCY ✨ they're disabled by default, so this is the unlock 🔓

there were more complications with reading from the filesystem, but as of TL22, those are solved 🎉 the transparency issue can't be fixed without a different Ghostscript implementation, and the Ghostscript devs say they have no timeline for that 😭

periodt, one more time: when you're using PSTricks and transparency, play it safe and use Lua(La)TeX instead of Xe(La)TeX 🫶💖

👑 OPTIONS 👑

all command-line arguments except --help and --version get passed straight to Xe(La)TeX 💅

🦋 BUGS 🦋

for more about XeTeX, hop over to https://tug.org/xetex 🌸

for more about PSTricks, check out https://tug.org/PSTricks 🧚

emailing about xe(la)tex-unsafe specifically? the list is https://lists.tug.org/dvipdfmx 💌

---

bestie, that's the whole page!! 🥹✨ XETEX-UNSAFE(1), General Commands Manual, last updated 20 November 2021 💖 stay safe out there and only run the unsafe stuff on files you trust 🫶🌈