[luatex] Why obsolete the fontforge name space?

[Hans Hagen]

Yue Wang wrote:

> If there are sufficient funding, write such binding is beneficial.

depends ... 99% of dev in the tex world is not funded and still beneficial

anyway, it's not on our agenda so such a lib + binding would end up in 
the add-ons activities later on; also, such a library should just expose 
  data which then could be transformed to something else using lua, i.e. 
it makes no sense to let such a lib construct a fontforge like table

actually, if the advantage is sought in faster loading keep in mind that 
it's the construction of the big tables that take runtime, and that will 
be true for all fontloaders (only faster processors and more mem can 
solve that; it's the price for flexibility and in the luatex project 
flexibility and opening up is more important than runtime; as such 
luatex will always be much slower than the other engines and fonts is 
just one aspect) (we have a few ideas for speedups but these might not 
show up before version 1.0)

the standard built-in fontloader datastructures are quite specific and 
will stay close to what fontforge does if only because it makes 
developing fonts as well as debugging lua code easier (for instance same 
internal feature interfaces) while other fontlibs might have a 
completely different exposure of font characteristics

Hans


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