[luatex] [Dev-luatex] Q: Can LuaTeX produce xdv?

Taco Hoekwater taco at elvenkind.com
Tue Jan 6 09:21:03 CET 2009


Hi,

I am moving this discussion to luatex at tug.org as it doesnt seem nearly
over yet. Please all stop replying to the thread in dev-luatex.

Reinhard Kotucha wrote in response to Arthur:
> Arthur Reutenauer writes in reponse to Jonathan Fine:
>  
>  > Maybe it's time that we turn the question the other way round and ask
>  > you for reasons to *do* so.  
> 
> Hi Arthur,
> as far as I remember, Jonathan explained clearly at the very beginning
> of the discussion why he is interested in an intermediate format.
>
>  > What, could you please tell us, is so great about *not* generating
>  > the end result directly that we should force ourselves to produce
>  > an intermediate file first, [...]
> 
> What do you mean with "end result"?  Unless I completely misunderstand
> everything, Jonathan does *not* intend to create PDF at all.
> 
> I assume that what Jonathan has in mind is something like
> 
>    http://www.mathtran.org/toys/jfine/editor2.html
> 
> Yes, the PDF backend is extremely expensive in this case, for several
> reasons.

Jonathan mentioned something about bidirectional information. That was
not the argument you now bring up on his behalf, and he never explained
why he wanted that information nor what he intends to do with it.

I may be  missing something, but I do not the relevance of extending
xdv to mathtran. Yes, PDF is a bad format for mathtran. But an extended
(and thus more complicated) xdv format would not be progress either:
Neither xdvipdfmx nor xdv2pdf generate png files.

Best wishes,
Taco


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