[luatex] [ANN] ufy - use LuaTeX, without the macro language

[Deepak Jois]

I have been working on this tool called ufy[1], which is essentially
just a wrapper around the LuaTeX binary to make it easier to do
typesetting with just Lua and avoid using the macro language entirely
(something I personally found to be very daunting to learn and use).

The tool also provides some other features like the ability to run
LuaTeX standalone (by overriding the kpse file discovery callbacks),
and support for loading LuaRocks modules (by replacing the default
kpse searcher with something that uses the LuaRocks loader).

I can think of some uses for it:

* My initial motivation was to use external libraries that I wrote
(luabidi and luaharfbuzz) with LuaTeX to shape bidi text in languages
like Urdu, Arabic etc. There is an example[2] that demonstrates a very
crude version of that.

* Use alternate text markup languages like Markdown for input.
Libraries like cmark-lua[3] can parse Markdown documents, and allow
walking the nested document structure. This can be utilized to convert
the Markdown document directly to LuaTeX nodelists.

Please let me know if you find this useful, or if you have any
feedback or criticisms.

[1]:https://github.com/deepakjois/ufy
[2]:https://git.io/vMjKQ
[3]:https://github.com/jgm/cmark-lua