[luatex] Hash tokens meaning

Sensei senseiwa at gmail.com
Tue May 28 15:09:56 CEST 2013


On 5/28/13 2:48 PM, Hans Hagen wrote:

> Another option is buying a real big hard disk, start the document with
> \tracingall (top of file), have a coffee break (or take a walk, or read
> tex-by-topic), locate the log file, find an editor that can load this
> beast and start deciphering what happens in there. Best take a real
> document, with proper font usage and lots of structure, lists and
> referencing as well as some interactive features.

Good, I've just loaded it and it's like looking at a compiler's chain of 
substitutions... on steroids (17K lines).

> Looking at the hash is rather useless as figuring out the expansion
> chain is non trivial (comparable to reading assembler, cpu instructions
> or bytecode). Looking at a traced log at least gives an impression of
> what *happens* which is a good first step.

Well, I do that, I write also in assembly and it's not that bad! As I 
said elsewhere, a static version is also interesting.

I will get deeper into latex source code!



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