On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 11:17:27AM +0100, Hans Hagen wrote:
Khaled Hosny wrote:
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 01:02:26PM +0800, Yue Wang wrote:
for LuaTeX. In ConTeXt world this is quite different, since Hans Hagen is a Lua+TeX+fontforge+MetaPost+whatever expert. So unless there exist several Hans Hagens in the LaTeX world, ordinary LaTeX users will not benefit from LuaTeX development.
That is why I believe that we should have some means to share must of the lower level Lua code across macro packages. For instance writing 2 or 3 OpenType layout modules is a waste of time, is it a big task of its
it depends ... in that respect writing two or more macro packages is also a waste of time (or even different variants of tables within a macro package etc)
Somehow it is ;), people usually have different needs and thus different macro packages, but I wonder why someone would need very different low level OpenType implementation, but I may be wrong.
own especially if you want to cover all scripts, there exists 3 free OpenType implementations and only one gets it almost right.
as i've said before, at some point i will provide a kind of generic variant of the context open type support, but currently my priority lays with getting the oriental projects related font support done (which is an interplay between font design and handling features) [so, any generic context code would be provided as-is and development driven via the context related lists]; with the luatex project we're not that much in a hurry anyway: we reimplement parts of tex, honouring the basic design of tex, adding a few things only, and opening things up step by step; after all, we have working pdftex's and xetex's so there is not that much need to hurry, cook up half solutions, end up in incompatible patch mode etc
But luatex has such great features that I want to use with other macro packages, I want to typeset some Arabic technical documents with Texinfo for example. May point is that, it would be great if we can have a kind of reference implementations of some of the very need functionality like OpenType, Unicode BiDi algorithm, Indic reordering and such, in a macro independent way that one can plug anywhere and write some higher level macro support on top of it. If a macro package don't feel like using it, they can write their own of course. I can argue this though, I'm not the one who writes the code here. Regards, Khaled -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localizer and member of Arabeyes.org team