[XeTeX] OT?: Interesting? post about LuaTeX on usenet:comp.text.tex

[Will Robertson]

On 11/08/2006, at 1:28 , William Adams wrote:

> I thought the commenting on XeTeX was kind of strange and off-key,
> hence my mention of it here.

Well, I'm only a young'un, but when I consider that these guys have  
used TeX on handfuls of different systems over the years, I can  
understand their reluctance to tie LuaTeX to any specific platform.  
It adds a whole lot of effort in the long run (how's Omega going  
after 15 years?) but it looks like people are actually willing to  
throw time and money at the problem now, which is pretty fantastic  
news for the TeX community.

In the meantime, we can write our macros and packages for unicode and  
font support and hopefully have a bit of experience when it comes to  
doing similar things for their project. And maybe complain at them  
when font support isn't just a matter of drag'n'drop (but perhaps it  
will be, and that'll be better).

The whole Lua scripting aspect of the thing really intrigues me.  
People say TeX is horrible to program in, and I wonder how  
fundamentally using a "real" programming language will affect what  
people will be able to implement.

Will
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