[luatex] Indic scripts

[Hans Hagen]

On 3/27/2018 3:22 AM, Mike Maxwell wrote:
> (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..."
This is because there are not that many limitations (at least i havaen't 
run into them). Also consider the fact that whatever libraries are used, 
they also have limitations so that shifts the argument. For instance TeX 
never could do graphics in its core (it's backend stuff) but 
nevertheless it always could produce documents with graphics.

Concerning scripts .. that's mostly a matter of demand ... some indic 
scripts are supported, some not yet. In the decade we have luatex now, 
no one ever asked for it. (Btw, discussions about these kind of things 
normally don't happen here but on the context list as we then need 
specs, samples, testing, long term continuity, etc.).

LuaTeX (as Arthur explained already) will never provide hard coded 
(either or not library based) solutions for typesetting. Even some (not 
font related) basic features could be done in lua but we keep the 
original around (also for efficiency reasons). The smaller the better.

Btw, being extensible means that luatex can sometimes be hip an dmodern 
too. We could support for instance variable fonts right from the start; 
not that anyone cares about that. In practice, pro-active development 
doesn't really pay of (supporting fancy pdf features comes to mind).

Of course you can add your own code either or not using libraries 
(possibly via ffi) but dependency on external code and solutions is not 
under the flag of luatex dev.

Hans


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