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

[Scott Pakin]

Yikes!  I didn't realize my suggestions would produce such a flurry of
comments.  Let me try to respond to the key points that have been
brought up:

1) A "PDFeLuaXeTeX" system is too much effort for a summer project.

I didn't realize that XeTeX represented such a deep change to TeX.  I
guess I had assumed that XeTeX was implemented as a set of TeX change
files and that the student would merely have to deal with a few
conflicts across change files and with integrating the various build
processes.

If a pdfLaTeX+eTeX+LuaTeX+XeTeX system is as tricky as everyone here
is claiming, then a good alternative is what Arthur Reutenauer and
Mojca Miklavec brought up: integrating XeTeX's font support at the
macro-package (viz., fontspec) level, presumably using Lua to
interface with external font libraries.  I'm sure that being able to
write things like \setromanfont{MyObscureSystemFont} in a LaTeX
document would be a great boon to LaTeX users.


2) The technologies needed for a handwriting-to-symbol Web page may
    not be available.

Thanks to Jonathan Fine for looking into some of the possibilities.
In addition to JavaScript and Java, Flash/ActionScript is another
likely candidate.

Also, it's probably not unreasonable to use a server-side C/C++
program that does the actual character recognition.  It's probably a
lot easier to find neural-network or OCR code written in C/C++ than in
other languages.

-- Scott