[luatex] Indic scripts

[Mike Maxwell]

(I thought I sent this yesterday; I thought wrong)

On 3/25/2018 11:20 AM, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 11:13:49AM -0400, Mike Maxwell wrote:
>> 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.

I searched for information about LuaTeX in general; as I say, I didn't 
realize it wouldn't natively handle complex scripts, so I wasn't really 
looking for information on that.  And most everything I saw said how 
good Luatex was; I never ran into anything that said "Don't use Luatex 
if..." or "Luatex is good except..."

And I hasten to say that Luatex has proven good at some things, like 
getting information out that would be inaccessible in other *TeXs.  (In 
particular, information about the contents of boxes, which I needed in 
my project.)  It just had significant limitations with regard to complex 
scripts that caught me by surprise, as I had come to take them more or 
less for granted.

> 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).  

I'm not quite sure what you mean here.  Perhaps by "making LuaTeX use 
HarfBuzz", you mean forcing it to use only HarfBuzz.  If that's what you 
mean, no worries; as long as I could turn on its use of HarfBuzz 
(whether by command line parameter or a TeX command), that would be fine.

-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    "My definition of an interesting universe is
    one that has the capacity to study itself."
          --Stephen Eastmond