[luatex] Why obsolete the fontforge name space?

[Hans Hagen]

Yue Wang wrote:

> What about leaving the fontforge name space in LuaTeX, and create a
> synoname as font loader (fontloader=fontforge)?
> In the future we might want to use different font library, so the user
> can switch to something they want.
> (For example, Mac user might prefer to use ATS, so some volunteers can
> create a binding in LuaTeX and users can choose the library using
> something like "fontloader=ats")
> At some point (when LuaTeX can load external system/lua library) some
> active user can also develop binding for freetype2 to gain faster
> speed and less memory consumption, and we can also switch to the
> binding using "fontloader=freetype2"
> All we need is to write the luafflib like binding code.

- as mentioned several times, the luatex dev team can (and will when 
they feel they have to) change the names of libraries, functions, new 
primitives etc

- since the loader is a subset and the code stripped we cannot call it 
fontforge (it's the adapted loading part of ff) hence the new name

- a macro package can (if it wants) in the future make any synonym it 
finds useful; there is no reason to burden the codebase with it; it can 
overload the loader any time it wants

- whatever library is used at some point by a user is not up to the core 
of luatex and since we will ship no such libraries their management is 
also iup to the macro package, and as it is quite unlikely that all kind 
of loaders behave the samesimple fontloader=myfontloader assignments 
need to be managed ny a macro package anyway (if it decides to support 
them in the first place)

- so, in practice, if you want to use another loader, you just hook in 
your code in the font definition define callback (as you have to do now) 
since the only thing that luatex expects back a tfm table, luatex does 
not care how ypu produce it

- so, in your case you will end up with

fontforge = fontloader
fontloade = myfontloader

Hans

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