On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 12:17 AM, John Culleton
Well I have been typesetting books in plain tex and pdftex for a decade or more. Supposedly luatex is a superset of pdftex that makes finding fonts easier and eliminates the generation of tmf files. But I seem to be sinking into a deeper swamp.
Here is the base problem. All other publishing related programs on my system will a) look in /usr/share/fonts and b) list the fonts fond there in a window when selecting fonts.
Laying aside b) for the moment it would be nice if some form of TeX (preferably not LaTeX) would join the party and find Type1, TTF and OTF fonts in the system standard location. Gimp does this, Scribus does this, Inkscape does this, Open Office Writer does this and so on. Luatex supposedly does this. But getting Luatex to work on a new standard distro , texlive 2010, seems to be a game of whackamole. I tried comp.text.tex but when no one there seemed to have the right answers and many of the names mentioned in the documentation were gurus here I thought I would ask how to get the luatex business set up.
My goal is to use the stuff myself of course but also to describe how to do it in a book I am writing on Free Publishing Software. It does not appear that Luatex is suitable for a newbie to set up. Remember, the competition consists of programs where you download and install the program and font finding is automatic. I write for an impatient audience who want to have it all just work without a lot of experimentation and fuss and feathers. There does not yet seem to be a reliable single set of instructions for installing Luatex and setting it up properly. When there is I will revisit the program.
Thanks for helping and sorry to have wasted your time.
A bit off topic: you can consider minimals & metatex.tex with mkiv (hence not texlive); it should build a (sort of) plain tex with luatex . See tex/context/base/metatex.tex but a bit of experience is required, I believe. -- luigi