Hans Hagen
Yue Wang wrote:
From my experience LuaTeX's result is very different from pdfTeX's result. The most notable one is that they give me different line breaks even with the same source and tfms given. Last time I was working on a Chinese translation of Karl's TeX for the Impatients, It occured to me that LuaTeX's linebreak is so different from pdfTeX's, and what's worse, LuaTeX gives me more overfull boxes. Of course, I use an old version of LuaTeX distributed in TeXLive 2008 (0.25.x, if memory serves). I doubt whether it will be possible for LuaTeX to produce the similar result as TeX does, (not to say pixel level).
we recenetly tested luatex (a more recent version than the one on tex live) with the texbook and there are only a few cases where we see differences, especially when ligatures occur at linebreaks; this is something that will be sorted out; 100% compatibility will never be reached because we use a slightly different route (separation of lig building, kerning, hyphenation and par building) but in practice this should not be a problem
so, best use a recent version
I think that 0.25.x might have the big bad hyphenation bug. However, I suppose even when using a version where this has been sorted out, TeX's behavior for things like shelf{}ful will not be imitated (in this case, TeX separates the ligature unless it does a hyphenation pass on the paragraph (can be forced with \pretolerance=-10000) in which case the ligature will get recombined. That's not something worth imitating. -- David Kastrup