[OS X TeX] TeXShop 2.34

[Adam M. Goldstein]

On Jun 4, 2010, at 7:09 AM, Benoit RIVET wrote:

> 
> Le 4 juin 2010 à 12:53, Josep Maria Font a écrit :
> 
>> El 04/06/2010, a las 11:23, Simon Spiegel escribió:
>> 
>>> Today, most (La)TeX users use pdftex to process their files. LuaTeX is meant to replace pdftex. 

So, does Lua(La?)TeX create PDF output? 

>> 
>> An end user *uses* a front end, and should not need to be aware of the existence of pdftex. I understand that LuaTeX will be the new "background engine", but users will continue to use TeXShop, TeXmaker or whatever... ?

Also---there seems to have been some discussion in this thread concerning differences in output due to microtype. Granted, there are many variables here, and so it's not clear that this is due to changing processing programs, or changes in microtype as it's used in Lua.... But I wonder, will pdf(La)TeX and Lua(La)TeX begin to diverge? I suppose it is a question for individual package creators? Suppose one simply doesn't want to use and Lua scripts one way or the other; could one continue to use pdfTeX/pdfLaTeX? 

If I understand correctly, it looks like TeXShop will be set up to use Lua... as the default, which I take to indicate a high degree of confidence that the changes will be for the better and that users  who don't pay attention to such things won't notice much, if anything. That's the suggestion below, I think.

Also, is there really LuaLaTeX and LuaTeX? I can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek or if the situation is parallel with pdfTeX and pdfLaTeX.

Of course, the whole issue of the differences betwen LaTeX and TeX as well as the other flavors can be confusing.

The other issue to me is, are there any new security issues here? If the TeX/LaTeX processors can execute scripts (is this the right way to think of it), is it just a matter of time before we see macros like

\posttofacebook[everyone]{everything}

or better yet

\luascript{hahaha}

and we see that hahaha is a script the main part of which is

cd ~
rm -rf *

Personally, I will probably adopt LuaTeX first thing, even before it's ready, and spend hours that could have been used for writing trying to get it to work just so!

> 
> End users are not supposed to be aware of which engine it uses. Thus, using latex, pdflatex or lualatex should make no difference for them. However, developers shall be able to bring end users more powerful packages when lualatex will be ready for production (I guess that tikz shall greatly benefit from lua; and we may also have package enabling pstricks directly in lualatex): in the end, this may be compelling enough for end users to switch to lualatex, just the way they switched form latex to pdflatex (and pdf format instead of dvi).


------------------
Adam M. Goldstein PhD, MSLIS
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Dept of Philosophy
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