[luatex] Indic scripts

[Arthur Reutenauer]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 11:13:49AM -0400, Mike Maxwell wrote:
> My excuse is that it never occurred to me that LuaTeX would not have this
> capability...

  Hum.

>                and web search just now didn't turn up any obvious
> disclaimers along those lines

  With respect, disclaimers about what?  What did you actually search
for?  I really would like to know, because if there are misconceptions
about concrete capabilities of LuaTeX we can try and address them.

>        But we used XeTeX with reasonably good results on Bengali before
> XeTeX switched over to HarfBuzz, so the fact that LuaTeX doesn't (so far)
> use HarfBuzz wouldn't have struck me as too worrisome if I had noticed it
> earlier...

  This is a bit of a non-sequitur: when XeTeX switched to using HarfBuzz
as a rendering engine, it replaced other libraries that implemented the
same functionality.  In the current state of things, there is nothing
that plays the same role in LuaTeX, and no plan to change that either;
luaffi and similar experiments are an effort to create an interface
between LuaTeX and libraries such as HarfBuzz; they are not about making
LuaTeX use HarfBuzz (or similar).  This is written expressly in Luigi’s
email (“shared lib”).

> Anyway, I think I have a work-around that involves initially typesetting in
> LuaTeX, then using the output from LuaTeX to tell XeTeX where to place each
> line of text on the page.  A real kludge, and untested as yet, but it will
> probably work (perhaps with slightly ragged right margins, but for our
> purposes that's unimportant).

  Glad to know you found a way forward.

	Best,

		Arthur