Khaled Hosny wrote:
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.
well, first of all i need the exercise of writing the machinery in order to understand open type; also i often want to add extra visualization stuff for manuals and such;
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.
well, maybe eventually the mkiv code can serve that purpose, but as said before, once it all works ok, i'll split modules and cook up some minimal system (this is also part of a more layered context mkiv) (btw, macro package independent way is non trivial, just look at how much independent stuff is there; long ago i made supp-pdf and even for something small and isolated like that latex interference problems kept coming up so eventually i ended up with stripping some code and having a more extended module for context) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------