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) concerning writing such an engine ... for me it's part of the fun (esp in relation to the oriental tex project) and i'm kind of glad that in context we can do it the way that suits context best (which in some aspects can be rather different from the way latex does things; for instance, we provide extra features on top of what the font does, have rather context specific tracing options, etc); personally i start from what users which kinds of determines the order of development (so, currently arabic and a bit of cjk)
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 also, even if much of the low level context mkiv lua code can be seen as generic i foresee many problems in reuse simply bcause macro packages differ in fundamental ways (otherwise there would not be different macro packages at all); also, keep in mind that latex has functionality split up over many packages, where redefining low level code is happening, which in turn does not really help] 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------