[luatex] Building a PDF with Lua code, without a TeX stub

[Deepak Jois]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 3:30 PM, Mojca Miklavec
<mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> That last part will be super tricky.
>
> I have no clue how you could possibly support typesetting without
> shipping any fonts or some basic files. I'm not saying that you need
> to depend on a working 4 GB installation of TeX Live or that you need
> to use TDS, but you *will* need some subset of files somewhere, you'll
> probably have to install some small subset of TeX Live tree along with
> your package in any case.

It’s possible to support a quite a few use cases without needing any
TeX related files.

* We can still leverage Lua code available in the standard Lua
installation (LuaRocks modules, other places in LUA_PATH etc) to make
up for any loss of functionality in terms of code. We do not strictly
need to use TeX macro packages. I know the TeX ecosystem is huge and
cannot be replaced easily, but it is still in the realm of possibility
to provide equivalent functionality using Lua.

* If we invoke LuaTeX with `--ini` we can eliminate the need for any
format files, and hence the need for any TEXMF trees.

*  LuaTeX's font.define function to define a font directly. It is
possible to load OpenType fonts directly from the filesystem using the
LuaTeX’s fontloader API, and define a font using them. Consumers of
the API can have OpenType font files in their working folder for their
specific typesetting requirements.

* It is also rely on fonts bundled in the OS. We can have a LuaRocks
module (it does not exist yet, but it’s possible to write one) that
can locate fonts on an OS, and use them.

Deepak