[tug-summer-of-code] A couple of project proposals

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 6:51 PM, Scott Pakin wrote:
> Here are a couple of ideas that popped into mind when I read Karl's
> announcement:
>
>   1) Grand Unified TeX
>      pdfTeX has cool features (micro-justification); eTeX has cool
>      features (extra developer primitives); LuaTeX has cool features
>      (cleaner scripting interface); XeTeX has cool features (ease of
>      using operating system fonts).  While the first three of those
>      are already integrated in modern TeX distributions, it'd be
>      really nice to further include XeTeX's font support into the
>      mix.

Hello,

I didn't quite understand the idea: do you propose that pdftex should
be able to use system fonts? That's not doable unless one writes
another XeTeX/LuaTeX-like flavour of TeX engine which means several
Taco-years. LuaTeX is able to/does use system fonts (at least inside
ConTeXt), its main problem is that it's not as widely usable in LaTeX
before someone writes (or adapts from ConTeXt) a big bunch of macros
to handle fonts, metapost images and some more ...

In my opinion this would be too much of a work for a short summer even
for an experienced TeX programmer.

Preparing a XeTeX-compatible "plain" LuaTeX format to make luatex more
LaTeX-friendly (so that either one could use
\font\a="Hoefler:mapping=tex-text;+onum" or so that at least fontspec
and polyglossia would work almost out-of-the-box) could be a nice
excercise, but it needs quite some cooperation and also a proper
mentor.

Mojca