[luatex] [texhax] Fwd: Luatex 1.0.0 announcement

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2016-09-27 at 21:27:07 +0200, Martin Schröder wrote:

 > 2016-09-27 21:19 GMT+02:00 William Adams <will.adams at frycomm.com>:
 
 > > Congratulations! And thank you --- we run an invoicing system
 > > here which would've been a lot more difficult to code up w/o
 > > being able to use lualatex for some of the calculations.
 > >
 > > Hate to be all Oliver Twist, but if I may make the first extended
 > > 1.0 feature request --- support for OpenType Variations?
 > >
 > >
 > > https://medium.com/@tiro/https-medium-com-tiro-introducing-opentype-variable-fonts-12ba6cd2369#.w0qlxz76u
 > >
 > > http://fontbureau.typenetwork.com/news/article/opentype-font-variations-open-up-a-world-of-possibilities
 > >
 > > http://practicaltypography.com/the-scorpion-express.html
 > 
 > Having read your first and last source, I'm not so sure we should
 > rush this.

I don't think that significant changes in LuaTeX are required.  Since
the glyf table is unchanged, I assume that the additional information
is in a new table which has to be converted to Lua as well.

When the new stuff appears in the Lua representation of an OpenType
font, new glyph outlines can be created by pure Lua code.  There is no
need to change LuaTeX itself in order to make use of the new features.

Admittedly, I don't know how OTFs are converted to Lua.  If the
fontforge library is used in order to parse OTF, we have to wait for
an update anyway.

I agree with William that "OpenType Variations" is a big step forward.
I always missed something like that.  We have zillions of serif and
sans-serif fonts but only very few typewriter fonts.  It would be nice
to be able to adapt the weight of a \tt font in order to make it
compatible with a particular text font.

I liked Adobe's first approach, "multiple master fonts".  The MM font
format extended Type 1 by simply replacing coordinates (numbers) with
equations.  Though it was an elegant solution, this approach was
sentenced to fail because one of the most important features of Type 1
fonts is that no fully-fledged PostScript interpreter is required for
rendering.  All existing programs (except Ghostscript) expected
coordinates to be numbers and didn't know what to do with equations.

The "OpenType Variations" approach is much better because it's a usual
OTF with additional information.  We can either ignore the new
features or make use of them.

Martin, there is no need to do something in a hurry indeed.  It will
take some time until fonts with the new fetures are available.  I'm
convinced that LuaTeX will be one of the first programs which will
support "OpenType Variations", just due to its flexibility.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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