[luatex] \font primitive does not read otf file

[Robin Fairbairns]

Paul Isambert <zappathustra at free.fr> wrote:

> Selon Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk>:
> 
> > Philipp Gesang <philipp.gesang at alumni.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:
> >
> > > ···<date: 2012-12-02, Sunday>···<from: Petr Olsak>···
> > >
> > > >                                  The solution which loads some sty
> > > > file and starts loading 18 another .sty files (!!) to solve one
> > > > SIMPLE problem is not compatible with plainTeX philosophy.
> >
> > but of course.  but then, luatex isn't exactly compatible with the
> > plaintex philosophy, what with plain's weird mangling of ascii and all.
> 
> I'm not sure what you refer to with the mangling of ASCII,

the first quadrant of ascii is replaced with a bunch of odds and ends,
as is space.

> but anyway if plain
> TeX philosophy is -- at least that's how I see it -- ``power to the user'' (so
> s/he can feel hairy on the chest), I think no engine is better fitted than
> LuaTeX to fulfill that program.

at a q&a at tug95, don was asked whether he had used latex; he said he
"didn't like large systems".  (cheers from back of room...)

while it's (just about) arguable that tex itself is a small system, one
has to strain the definition to breaking point to accept that luatex is
such a one, too.

personally, this doesn't bother me; the side effect -- complicated font
loading -- seems to bother some.

> But then, I'm both a do-it-yourself fundamentalist and LuaTeX fanatic :)

i am happy to do-it-myself when "it" hasn't already been done well
enough by someone else.  (or i used to be ... as i get older, i'm
slowing down.)

remember, the argument started because of a complaint that "load a font"
in luatex seemed to involve a large bunch of packages -- which was
"incompatible with the plain philosophy".  plain's approach to fonts was
to work well enough with a small set of carefully tailored fonts.  petr
has written a plain tex font-selector (ofs) which allows the user to go
beyond knuth's tailored fonts; istm that ofs bursts the bounds of the
philosophy, by being (rather) big.  _i_ am impressed by ofs; surely a
plain tex philosopher would frown at it.

fwiw, i'm not terribly keen on computer modern, any more.  its style is
150 (or so) years old, and as my eyesight fails i find it harder and
harder to read.  (my partially-sighted wife can't cope with it at all,
but her choice of fonts seems pretty odd to me.)

robin