Re: [Dev-luatex] It seems that harfbuzz people care luatex and xetex a lot...

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 12:17:44PM -0400, Yue Wang wrote:

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Hans Hagen wrote:

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Yue Wang wrote:

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QUOTE:

so if you wan tto use those libraries use xetex instead then (no gain in using luatex); the objective of the luatex project is to have a regular opened up tex engine with all under user/macro package control

Harfbuzz is not a high level language layout engine like ICU that is used in xetex. It is just a OTF loading library (it's the successor of freetype1 otf loading code). And it will be the opensource opentype rendering standard in the future.

HarfBuzz does much more than loading OTF fonts; it is a complete OpenType layout engine, you pass strings to it and get glyph indices (with X and Y positions) in return, which is nowhere near what the current luatex font loading library does. -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team Free font developer