[luatex] using (pdf)lualatex

[Arthur Reutenauer]

> - Well, if we want to calculate it, then control box might be much
> more efficient.

  OK, but that's not for right now, apparently.

> - If we dont calculate, good, we can use  1) TrueType/ OpenType's glyf
> table 2) CFF's global bounding box, they are much better than giving 4
> zeros.

  You don't get the intent.  If you, the macro package writer, wants to
reduce the memory footprint of LuaTeX when you load some font, you have
the choice to say fontforge.open(that_font, false), and LuaTeX won't
calculate the individual glyphs' bounding boxes, it will fill the Lua
tables with meaningless information.  Then it's your responsibility to
use some reasonable default instead, like the CFF FontBBox.

  Hence, it's pretty unimportant what the Lua tables for the glyphs'
bounding box contain (by the way, Taco, wouldn't be nil even better?);
the point is that you don't calculate the real bounding boxes.  And it
sounds like you're actually happy with the idea; so that's cool, but it
would really be simpler if you tried to answer one question at a time
and not raising related issues each time someone makes a suggestion.

> Yes. But as far as I know, the only need in current luatex/mkiv is to
> get the height and depth

  The bottom line is that none of the vector font formats contains that
basic information that has been in TFM's since they exist.  So we need
to find a substitute in the font information that's available.

> I mean pdflualatex, not LuaTeX engine. Hans said in the ntg-mailing
> list that he will implement a plain TeX package to use opentype fonts,
> without font cache.

  But Hans won't write a line of code for LaTeX.  At some point things
have to be done by the people who really care about LaTeX (not my case
either).

	Arthur