[pdftex] TeX as a composition server?

[Paul Isambert]

  Le 24/10/2010 17:10, Arthur Reutenauer a écrit :
>>                                          And then you can build you own
>> library, of course (I guess luaotfload -- which isn't built in LuaTeX
>> but is independent code -- does something like that, to avoid searching
>> all directories each time a font is called).
>    luaotfload simply uses ConTeXt code that has been extracted for that
> purpose.

Yes. Those ConTeXt people are quite good at LuaTeX; I guess they must 
have moles in the LuaTeX team...

>    It is indeed some kind of library, as you say, although not in
> the sense Martin meant ("shared library" in a narrower meaning).  But
> what's certain is that it's really not a "system" library of any kind:
> it's not related to the operating system and is platform-independent.

What I meant exactly was that luaotfload builds some kind of library for 
its own purpose on its first run (I'm not sure because I don't use it 
that way). Loading a font by name would be extremely painful otherwise. 
It is not, indeed, a shared library, and probably not a library at all: 
just a mapping from names to files, I suppose.

One thing I'd like to know -- totally off-topic -- is whether luaotfload 
commits to an external file the LuaTeX representation of those fonts 
that have been converted once (thus building a collection of ``LuaTeX 
fonts''), or if it does the conversion each time.

Best,
Paul