[Dev-luatex] Q: Can LuaTeX produce xdv?

[Hans Hagen]

Yannis Haralambous wrote:
> Talking about DVI and PDF, I am the first one to be concerned about the 
> programmed extinction of DVI because I have many jobs based on DVI 
> post-processing (for example for marginal material, headers, and even 
> for parallel texts between two pages). The advantage with DVI is that 
> you can very easily now where you are located on the page so that you 
> can extract text with positional information, and you can also easily 
> insert new text (using pushes and pops).

i'm not sure if you refer to the same kind of positional info, but 
pdftex (and therefore luatex) hasn pdfsavepos cum suis in both pdf and 
dvi mode so you can store positions (lazy, i.e. write them to file in 
the backend) and then use them in a second pass (it't a rather old 
feature by now, which started as an experiment by Thanh and me and for 
some time was only available in pdf mode and in dvi mode we could use 
specials and the dvipos postprocessor; after a while it was also added 
to dvi mode)

on the agenda is some more positional (runtime, in prerolls using boxes 
and getting pos into afterwards), a kind of pet project in parallel

> And with the Mars format there is always hope that all that will be 
> written in XML...

and xps .. although one might have problems then with packages resources 
(and files become large too)

Hans


-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
               Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
      tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
                                              | www.pragma-pod.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------