[XeTeX] [tex-live] Ftuture state of XeTeX in TeXLive

[Alan Munn]

On Oct 28, 2011, at 10:27 AM, Kirk Lowery wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Generally, all XeTeX documents must render in luatex without the need
> of modifying the source. I see that things are changing. Simple नमस्ते
> दुनिया fails in luatex from TL 2010 but works in TL 2011. We cannot
> switch from XeTeX to luatex today but it may be possible in the
> future.
> 
> Is there a feature comparison between LuaTeX and XeTeX out there somewhere? In other words, when do we know when LuaTeX is ready for XeTeX users?

As I understand it, many of the important XeLaTeX packages (e.g. Polyglossia and xeCJK, and probably others) make extensive use of XeTeXinterchartoks mechanism. LuaLaTeX has no direct equivalent to this, and so porting these packages to LuaTeX will require significant work.

For a proof of concept solution that Taco posted see <http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/21625/in-luatex-is-it-possible-to-change-font-language-according-to-the-script-glyphs/21691#21691>

However in the comments it is mentioned that there may be problems with this solution and that LuaTeX has more powerful ways of doing the same thing, but I don't think anyone has done it to date.

The issues that drove the development of XeLaTeX (language support) are not the same issues that drive the development of LuaTeX, and so although there is a lot of overlap in what they each can do, LuaTeX doesn't address the needs of many XeLaTeX users at the moment.

Alan

-- 
Alan Munn
amunn at gmx.com