On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 12:23 PM, Thomas de Vivo wrote:

hi there

I'm a member of the Institute of Italian culture in Tbilisi "a non-profit organization focused on coworking, humanism, and social innovation"

https://istitutoculturaitaliana.org/

and we are trying to adopt the well known and greatly appreciated by me linebreak algorithm of Donald Knuth for our publishing.

Since we are focused mainly on the web (i.e. "internet", not the Knuth's literary language) and since we want an highly customizable solution, we would like to translate at least the core functionalities of Tex (or better, the linebreak in itself with some required features related to it, like glyphs, nodes, (fonts) and so on), in some internet script, like specifically php and javascript (especially the first is not excluded, if I remember correctly, among the languages you have excluded during the choice of Lua).

Our purpose, however, would be to "atomize" as much as possible the core features of Tex so to make them (as possible) easy understandable and, as possible, usable as "standalone" scripts: this should be true for the mentioned linebreak but also for the paging (the positioning of paragraphs along the pages) itself. As well as of course for the hyphenation engine. [to be more precise, our version could be focused on XML input and XML output, so to avoid both the markup language of Tex, and the pdf output, not required in the use on the web since we want to use HTML5]

ConTeXT MKIV (luatex engine + macros) has an XML input / XML output "way" . The context mailing list is the right place to ask (btw a pdf output for digital archiving is also a good idea).

I have take a look at the -- impressive -- work of Taco Hoekwater, with whom I have exchanged some messages -- and he directed me to the Lua version of linebreak of Hans Hagen.

well, the lua version is an opportunity, but it's hard to understand and manage.

Now my question, and my proposal to you is the following.

I'm willing to make such work, which would be publicly available to you, but I would need detailed information about how to proceed, so to avoid wasting time in the less pleasant task for a programmer: to understand the code of somebody else.

As already stated to Taco, I'm a humanist at the base, however I think that we are all called to deal with the technical problems posed by the every day life.

Searching only a bit I have found https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630181 https://github.com/bramstein/typeset/ http://tug.org/tex-hyphen/pdf/hyphenator.pdf so it' not a news di per se. -- luigi