[luatex] Option handling in LuaLaTeX package

Ulrike Fischer luatex at nililand.de
Wed Jun 5 00:25:52 CEST 2019


Am Tue, 4 Jun 2019 16:28:47 +0200 schrieb Urs Liska:


>>> To reiterate the question: Is this approach to handling options
>>> something that already exists (so we shouldn't have bothered with the
>>> implementation in the first place)? If not am I right with the
>>> assumption that it would be a good idea to make it available as a
>>> generic package, say `luaoptions`?
>> I only looked very briefly at the description so perhaps missed a
>> point. key-val-syntax is certainly used a lot by various packages,
>> but normally packages are written so that they can be used with more
>> than one engine, so a key-val-system that requires luatex as engine
>> is probably useful only for a small number of packages.
> 
> 
> This is of course true but probably looks at the issue from the wrong 
> direction.
> 
> Yes, we do have a solution that depends on Lua. But this is because our 
> whole package totally relies on Lua to perform its work. Making parts of 
> our machinery available outside of the context of our package should 
> make sense even if it is limited to other luatex packages.

I didn't try to imply that the package is useless, only that there
are probably not so many packages who can use it. From all the
packages I created, maintain or I'm somehow involved currently only
one is pure luatex (luaotfload) and this has no option handling.


> The aspect that seems to make the option handling in the package useful 
> is that it's not simply an implementation of key-value package options 
> but an integrated solution to handling options on the package, the 
> global, and the per-item level. 

Sure I understand this, and it is useful, see e.g. siunitx for an
implementation with tex macros: in siunitx you can set options as
package options, or with \sisetup, or locally in optional arguments.    



-- 
Ulrike Fischer 
https://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/



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