[Dev-luatex] beta 0.20.0 released

[Jonathan Sauer]

Hello,

> I have just released the new beta for luatex, with version 
> number now at 0.20.0. This will be the last beta with big 
> changes in it for a while: I will start work on the mplib 
> project now, and that will be my main focus for the coming 
> two/three months. I have planned for bug-fix releases for 
> this beta, though.

Great news!

What does this mean for the further development of LuaTeX?
I would guess that the fourth stage, as defined on LuaTeX's
homepage, is now finished. Still:

- Apart from integrating MetaPost and the TODO list in the
  manual, is LuaTeX feature-complete?

- Can the Lua interface be considered as being (more or less)
  stable?

- What is planned between 2008 and 2010?

> * Completely overhauled hyphenation and ligkern application,
>    including the addition of a new "lang" table in lua to
>    interface to the language parameters, some extra functions
>    in the "node" table, and a few extra callbacks ("hyphenate",
>    "ligaturing", "kerning", "post_linebreak_filter").

This is a really, really great change from the original TeX,
especially:

- "--" does not insert a discretionary (well, if \exhyphenchar
  is set to 0).

- \hyphenation can contain complex discretionaries, thus allowing
  automatic changes such as backen => bak-ken ("to bake").

> * a bunch of bugs reported on the mailing list have been
>    fixed (I hope all of them).

I'm afraid to ask: What about font expansion? ;-)

> Have fun,

I will. I guess I will dump eTeX as the required engine for my
private format and use LuaTeX all the way. No more active characters
for input and output encoding, better key-value processing ...
nice!

Well, as soon as I have figured out how to correctly load OpenType
fonts ... incidentally, that is an place the manual could use some
work: Section 4.12.2 explains how to get a metrics table from an
OpenType font -- but now, what this metrics table contains. That
makes it quite difficult to convert it to a tfm font table.


> Taco

Jonathan