[lltx] paragraph breaking in lua (node-ltp)

[Élie Roux]

Frank,

Sending this to luatex at tug.org, certainly has a better chance to be
answered here.

> I'm very much interested in playing around with variations of Knuth's
> paragraph breaking algorithm.

Me too, it's been almost two years I'd like to but never had enough time
to start, maybe now is the right time!

> I recently learned that Taco (I think) did a full reimplementation in
> lua that would be perfect for me to do a few experiments.
> 
> Unfortunately I'm unable to to make this work e.g., produce a short TeX
> file that actually uses the code. Anybody out there who could give a
> helping hand?

The best would certainly be to make a short plain TeX example using the
raw file, and start to work on the bugs, maybe Taco and Hans would be
ready to help?

Maybe working on a github (or bitbucket or whatever) repository so that
several people can work on it? We're using a "lualatex" group on github,
it might be a good starting point?

> meteorically I think such code should work with any flavor of TeX (eg
> plain)

Absolutely

> but if there are some reasons that right now it is only possible
> to use it with a very specific environment that doesn't matter for what
> I'm trying to do ... all I need is something that I can feed paragraph
> examples to.

My idea when I think about that would be to make an optional package
like 'luaparbuilder' that would use the code and provide a few callbacks
and options. For instance I would just need to make a few operations on
a line before the algorithm starts to evaluate it, so there could be a
callback for that... What do you think?

Thank you,
-- 
Elie