[luatex] plain LuaTeX

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 10 February 2009 وفا خلیقی wrote:

 > I never use PDFTeX. I only use TeX (the original TeX written by
 > Knuth) for typesetting my books, articles, papers and etc in
 > English. If I want to produce any Persian document then mostly use
 > XeTeX and sometimes LuaTeX.

If you run tex, i.e. you invoke it as tex on the command line, then
you always get Knuth's TeX.  There are not even other hyphenation
patterns available than those Knuth provided himself.  The only change
that had been made is to adapt the program to the operating system you
are using.  This is encouraged by Knuth and is unavoidable anyway.
Nobody is talking about changing anything else.

 > As a long time Plain TeX user, I only will accept changes from
 > Knuth not others and so other Plain TeX users.

The discussion is about adding extensions to tex engines which had been
extended already.  These are etex, omega, pdftex, xetex, luatex, ...

There is nothing wrong to add more extensions to them.  I suppose the
reason of your concerns is that it is not 100% clear what is meant
with "extending plain".

Well, it's not intended to change the file plain.tex.  The idea is to
add extensions when the format file for luatex is created, for
example:

\input plain
\input extensions
\dump

This has absolutely no effect on Knuth's TeX.  It only adds extensions
to engines which had been extended already.  There is no reason to be
worried.  Nobody intends to change the behavior of Knuth's TeX.

And if you are using xetex or luatex, you already accept that the
extensions had not been made by Knuth himself.  These extensions had
been designed carefully.  If you don't use them, everything behaves as
described in The TeXbook.  Regarding luatex, there are probably two
exceptions: The line breaking algorithm had been revised and the
future of DVI output is unclear ATM because Knuth's DVI format is too
limited.  xetex already uses an extended variant of Knuth's DVI.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
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