An external module is fine by me, I’m not concerned about LuaTeX itself
since even the current loader is not integrated, I’m rather concerned
about the ability to use the new loader and shaper with ConTeXt.
A minimal luatex wrapper for harfbuzz for Linux x86_64 is quite straight
Build configuration:
Unicode callbacks (you want at least one): Glib: true ICU: false UCDN: false
Font callbacks (the more the better): FreeType: true
Tools used for command-line utilities: Cairo: true
Additional shapers (the more the better): Graphite2: false
-- test.lua -- local f,error=package.loadlib("./swiglib/harfbuzz/core.so","luaopen_core");
if not(f) then print(error) return end; local helpers=f(); for k,v in pairs(helpers) do print(k,v) end
"" In principle one can plug in anything if it behaves nicely, but of
course one cannot expect existing mechanisms (we have additional
features and such) to be dropped in favor of something else without
pretty good reason. Btw, for me (that is personal) i think that it's not bad to have an
alternative shaper like we have in context if only because a standard
(like opentype) is no standard if there is only one (to be used)
implementation. ""
It's also important to have a shaper that behaves in the same way in windows/linux/mac without depends on too many external libs -- at the ctx meeting in brejlov 2010 there was a talk by a dutch company about this.