[luatex] LuaTeX + LaTeX

[Will Robertson]

On 2009-02-04 09:16:55 +1030, Arthur Reutenauer 
<arthur.reutenauer at normalesup.org> said:

>> This compatibilty is broken with two major packages: inputenc and fontenc.
>> The two styles are not working at all anymore.
> 
>   There is a small lua-inputenc contributed by Javier Bezos
> (CTAN:macros/latex/exptl/lualatex/lua-inputenc/), that does some of the
> basics, but you'll surely run into some problems, in particular if you
> want to write out to a file (XeTeX's \XeTeXinputencoding has the same
> problem).
> 
>   fontenc would surely be a much bigger issue.
> 
>   To speak the truth, I think it's quite a waste of time to try
> implementing inputenc and fontenc in LuaTeX, because they're so much
> tied to the 8-bit limitations of the older TeX engines: it sounds to me
> like wanting to draw a railway carriage with horse power (or, for our
> Australian readers, Afghan camels ;-)

We have horses too :)
On the other hand, I've eaten camel, but never horse.

The big reason to try and emulate inputenc to some degree is so that 
new users don't get confused when their documents with the seemingly 
correct
  \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
don't suddenly die when run on XeTeX or LuaTeX when all >8-bit 
characters start being interpreted in octets.

Supporting older encodings is a more minor point; convenient for those 
people with legacy documents. But as you say above, it may be (or 
probably is) impossible to achieve 100% compatibility.

* * *

fontenc would presumably stay the same; since XeTeX and LuaTeX can both 
use tfm-based fonts (right?), then the machinery stays exactly the 
same; new unicode fonts (in fontspec, anyway) simply use the EU1 font 
encoding. Not that support there is perfect, but people haven't been 
too adventurous mixing TFM and OTF fonts in XeTeX, to my relief.

Cheers,
Will