[lltx] Re: luamicrotype?

[Khaled Hosny]

On Wed, Mar 03, 2010 at 03:29:09PM +1030, Will Robertson wrote:
> On 03/03/2010, at 3:18 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> 
> > I'm already struggling with fontspec having to support XeTeX too (I
> > really hate when I've to deal with complex, mind blowing TeX code that
> > one can replace by straightforward, easy to understand lua functions).
> 
> fontspec is a particularly bad example, because it was my first LaTeX
> package and grew rather awkwardly over a number of years. The code
> design is pretty bad, but I'm not the sort of person to rewrite things
> from scratch, so I'm trying to slowly fix it up as I go along.

Fontspec was just an example, but I do get the same "mind blow" whenever
I attempt to read any TeX code of moderate complexity, and I'm pretty
sure it isn't only me.

> FWIW, having not written significant amounts of Lua code yet means that
> actually I'm far more comfortable with TeX macros than Lua code, but I'm
> not arguing that Lua isn't the way to go for any new programmatic tasks.
> 
> But I agree with Robert that there's no point replacing an already-existing
> implementation in TeX with a new one in Lua just because Lua is the more
> sane programming language.

If there is a working TeX implementation, then it is fine, but FWIU,
microtype for LuaTeX can only do protrusion/expansion so it doesn't
provide much more than what luaotfload does provide now (except that we
don't have many predefined sets, but it is easy to convert microtype's
to some lua tables), so we are mostly talking about unwritten code here.

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer