[OS X TeX] MetaTeX: pdfTeX, XeTeX, Aleph, MetaPost and LuaTeX come together

[Bruno Voisin]

In relation to the matter of LuaTeX that was briefly mentioned in the  
recent thread "[OS X TeX] Save date-time, not Print date", people  
might find interesting the interview of Taco Hoekwater at <http:// 
www.tug.org/interviews/interview-files/taco-hoekwater.html>: it  
discusses the LuaTeX project, its schedule, its relation to pdfTeX,  
MetaPost, Aleph and XeTeX, and the planned emergence of a MetaTeX at  
some point in the -- probably distant -- future (as well as  
Elsevier's perception of TeX, the role of TUG and local user groups,  
among other interesting things).

Much of it is probably too technical for non-geeks, but there are  
also very practical and understandable views like:

"PdfTeX aims for the absolute best quality and as much  
configurability as possible. Therefore, it does all typesetting tasks  
everything itself, often at the expense of more source code and  
therefore longer development cycles. XeTeX aims for the highest ease  
of use for users and economy of implementation. Therefore, it uses  
external libraries for some of its tasks. The result is that XeTeX is  
not able to do micro-typography like pdfTeX, and pdfTeX is way behind  
XeTeX when it comes to oriental script support."

Bruno Voisin

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