[luatex] Luatex 1.09.0 announcement (following)

Henri Menke henrimenke at gmail.com
Fri Nov 30 09:56:03 CET 2018


On 11/30/18 9:45 PM, Hans Hagen wrote:
> On 11/30/2018 8:41 AM, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
>>
>> About a month ago I wrote:
>>
>>>> We have a new pdf parser (pplib from Paweł Jackowski) that replaces
>>>> poppler.  It is much smaller, a bit faster and it's written in
>>>> pure C [...]
>>>
>>> Is there a project page for pplib?  The source code of this library
>>> contained in TeXLive is very, very uncommented – in particular, a
>>> description of the API is completely missing, AFAICS.  It also comes
>>> with overly long lines and extremely densely written C code; it
>>> almost feels as if the original source has been written with cweb or
>>> something like that.
>>
>> I would be glad if someone could answer my question.
> 
> During bachotex 2018 Pawel Jakowski (son of Jacko -- tex gyre project)
> showed me some code and after looking at it we realized that it could be
> used as drop in for poppler.
> 
> In luatex, the pdf library, is actually not used that much: it can open
> a pdf file and traverse the object tree. It has no further role in the
> backend which copies and creates objects itself. So, a lightweight drop
> in basically was considered doable quite well. Pawel explicitly limited
> the functionality to a bare minimum: opening a file and traversing
> objects. (But it's quite advanced as for instance we can also access to
> password protected files).
> 
> So, basically it went this way: pawel wrote the code, I replaced the
> inclusion code and rewrote the pdf access library (so that one got a
> different interface but the old one was way more complex and even has
> issues; we're not compatible here). Then luigi spent quite some time on
> integrating the library in the luatex source tree.
> 
> The final integration involved dealing with cross platform issues.
> Especially the arm platform with different alignment rules took some
> work (luigi and pawel sorted that out eventually). We had soem feedback
> from context testers (it's also always debatable to what extend one
> should support fuzzy cases, bad documents etc).

That's definitely a sign of code smell.  The code should not depend on
the memory layout of the platform (unless you write an operating system
or a compiler).

> 
> There might still be corner cases to cover but we expect all to be ready
> in time for tex live 2019. The biggest advantage is that we got rid of a
> c++ dependency and that the code (which is unlikely to change much) is
> part of the luatex code base. So it's in fact a library specially made
> for luatex originating in the tex community.
> 
> I hope that explains it a bit (there is not much more to tell i guess;
> normally this kind of progress gets reported in status articles),
> 
> Hans
> 
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>                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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