[luatex] using (pdf)lualatex

Yue Wang yuleopen at gmail.com
Mon Feb 2 09:51:11 CET 2009


Hi:


> I was very surprised to see here links to my humble site
> and informal kotex (Korean TeX) repository, which was
> prepared by KTUG for Korean users of texlive 2008.
>

Karl asked on the mailing list for some lualatex samples, and your CJK
sample is the only one that I can find and understand:)

> Luatexko.sty and other related macros were developed
> just for testing or evaluating the possibility of typesetting
> Korean documents using luatex. The codes are messy and
> there's no documentation except than somewhat terse
> three-page guideline written in Korean. Sorry for that.
>

Well, it's much better than no:)
In China we suggest users use xetex instead of luatex since luatex's
latex support is too immature (especially for the lack of a fontspec
equivalent) and no one is willing to make a latex package for luatex
since the manual contains too much buzzwords. The luatex api is all
greek to ordinary macro developers.

> I think luatexko can typeset modern Korean document
> quite well, if luatex binary is compiled from recent svn repository.
> The binary from texlive distribution is not usable with latex
> because of its many bugs, which were fixed after version 0.30.
>

Yes, I can typeset my Korean document quite well using that package.
And it is not complicated to install the Korean fonts.

> Currently, however, luatexko cannot deal with opentype layout
> features (especially, those of ccmp, ljmo, vjmo and tjmo),
> which are essential for typesetting old Korean documents
> being used until 100 years ago or so.  I am waiting for
> a more general solution from latex (or plain tex) world
> rather than implementing Korean-language-specific stuffs right now.
>
> BTW, the only shortcoming of current luatex seems to be that
> it consumes so much memory while loading CJK truetype fonts
> whose size is normally much bigger than Latin fonts
> (100 times bigger case is not infrequent), that it is almost
> unusable under machines with small size of ram.
>

Well, I have been suggesting this problem to Hans and Taco several
times during the last year. In ConTeXt this problem can be split into
two since ConTeXt use the font cache mechanism (it can dump the
metrics table from the font and store it as a lua table into the disk)

- When the font cache is given, LuaTeX seems to use too much memory
(It usually used up to 600M when typeset a document with only 3
Chinese fonts (song,hei,kai)). And this problem is solved by Taco and
Hans several month ago by changing the Lua C source code. However, the
memory footprint is still a little bit large (more than 300M for 3
Chinese fonts). It will take 3-4 seconds on my machine to load the
font cache for three Chinese fonts.

- When the font cache is not given, ConTeXt will try to dump one on
the first run. LuaTeX will use much more memory than expected. For
example, only loading the metrics from an ordinary Chinese font like
AdobeSongStd-Light (a 13M font) in plain TeX will use more than 700M
memory. I reported this problem to the ntg-context mailing list
yesterday.

For a normal publication, usually some 5 or 6 Chinese fonts will be
used. In some cases dozens of these fonts might be used. So it will
take very long time for luatex to parse the fonts, as well as huge
memory to store the metrics data. So it is suggested that users who
want to try luatex should have a computer with large memory and fast
CPU since the fontforge library is a nightmare for Asian users who
have old machines.


> Anyway,  those who are interested can download and install
> luatexko package for texlive 2008 by issuing command:
>
> tlmgr --location=http://ftp.ktug.or.kr/KTUG/texlive/2008 install
> kotex-dev kotex-base
>
> Best,
> Dohyun Kim
>


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