[luatex] otf fonts (ligatures, cache, etc.)

[Elie Roux]

Hello,

I'm improving luaminimalotf, now (with great help from Hans) it supports 
ligatures and substitutions pretty well. I think I'll rename it 
luaotfload, as it will care about otf loading (with the XeTeX font 
syntax) and features setting. I'll also make another package to adapt 
the mechanisms to LaTeX, with the same syntax as fontec does for XeTeX. 
I don't know yet if it will be an adaptation of fontspec or if I'll 
rewrite things from scratch...

I have a few questions about otf support, and the way TeX and ConTeXt 
handle things. First is it possible to declare ligatures of three 
glyphs? for example 1/4 (I'm sure there are more pertinent examples in 
languages I don't know)? I didn't find it in the manual...

Also, how should I handle font cache? For example when I ask to load the 
same font (with same options) with different size, should I reopen the 
font (with all the fontloader.open things) entirely, or just copy the 
old one and rescale it?

I finally got an answer from Frank, he refuses to let a third-party 
package be loaded by inputenc, and he thinks things are not stable 
enough now to be integrated. We'll see next year... The problem being 
that luainputenc really needs a lot of code from luatextra and 
luamcallbacks, and I think it would be stupid to duplicate it into 
luainputenc for its integration into LaTeX... In the meantime, 
luainputenc now loads inputenc if called with pdfTeX, and xetex-inputenc 
if called with XeTeX.

Thank you,
-- 
Elie