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

[Hans Hagen]

Will Robertson wrote:
> 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.
luatex is not bound to any platform; actually i have an (already old) 
experimental version sunning on my windows and linux box
>
> 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.
the lua stuff is actually fun, but we mostly play with interfacing tests; the basic idea is to gave callbacks at every important stage in the tex process/engine; also, the tex language will still be there, after all, it's not that bad -) 

Hans 

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