[pdftex] TeX as a composition server?

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 23 October 2010 ivo welch wrote:

 > besides, it would be good if TUG assumed a more proactive role, and
 > officially deprecated old aspects of TeX.  time to move into the
 > 21st century.

We are in the 21st century already.

 > time for luatex to become the official standard at some point.

It's a moving target ATM.

 > I know it may break compatibility, but TeX's age is really
 > beginning to show.

As long as we are talking about TeX, we insist on compatibility.

If you want something more modern, you need a completely different
program.  You can steal the good aspects from TeX (paragraph
formatting, hyphenation,...), replace Knuth's horrible macro processor
by a reasonable scripting language, and so on.  Knuth encouraged this
from the beginning, the only requirement is that such a program isn't
called TeX.

 > the number of hackers that can still program in this ancient tongue
 > is not growing.

If you want, re-write the LaTeX kernel in Lua.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
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Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
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