Hello,
I have just released the new beta for luatex, with version number now at 0.20.0. This will be the last beta with big changes in it for a while: I will start work on the mplib project now, and that will be my main focus for the coming two/three months. I have planned for bug-fix releases for this beta, though.
Great news! What does this mean for the further development of LuaTeX? I would guess that the fourth stage, as defined on LuaTeX's homepage, is now finished. Still: - Apart from integrating MetaPost and the TODO list in the manual, is LuaTeX feature-complete? - Can the Lua interface be considered as being (more or less) stable? - What is planned between 2008 and 2010?
* Completely overhauled hyphenation and ligkern application, including the addition of a new "lang" table in lua to interface to the language parameters, some extra functions in the "node" table, and a few extra callbacks ("hyphenate", "ligaturing", "kerning", "post_linebreak_filter").
This is a really, really great change from the original TeX, especially: - "--" does not insert a discretionary (well, if \exhyphenchar is set to 0). - \hyphenation can contain complex discretionaries, thus allowing automatic changes such as backen => bak-ken ("to bake").
* a bunch of bugs reported on the mailing list have been fixed (I hope all of them).
I'm afraid to ask: What about font expansion? ;-)
Have fun,
I will. I guess I will dump eTeX as the required engine for my private format and use LuaTeX all the way. No more active characters for input and output encoding, better key-value processing ... nice! Well, as soon as I have figured out how to correctly load OpenType fonts ... incidentally, that is an place the manual could use some work: Section 4.12.2 explains how to get a metrics table from an OpenType font -- but now, what this metrics table contains. That makes it quite difficult to convert it to a tfm font table.
Taco
Jonathan