[pdftex] TeX as a composition server?

[ivo welch]

won't be me.  I am a casual user, though I do donate to various causes.

yes, it would be great if someone wrote a replacement for TeX and
LaTeX, taking the typesetting language and yanking the macro language.
 unfortunately, nothing whatsoever seems to be on the horizon.  heck,
I would pay good money for an alternative.  no such thing exists.

TUG has no real power, but it has moral suasion, and it does produce
the de-facto standard through its TeXLive distributions.  if it shows
no leadership, no one else will, either.  (yes, luatex may not be
ready, but when it is, making it THE standard would be a step in the
right direction.)

/iaw



On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 7:13 PM, Reinhard Kotucha
<reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
> 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
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
> Marschnerstr. 25
> D-30167 Hannover                              mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>