[Dev-luatex] XML abilities in LuaTeX

[Hans Hagen]

TeXWorld wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm new to LuaTeX and Lua in general and I try to find tools to process 
> datas stored in XML files.
> I want to do this with LaTeX (pdfLuaLaTeX in TeXLive 2008) but there's 
> no tool. Contrary to LaTeX, ConTeXt does have abilities to work with XML 
> files.
> Do you think it could be possible to have LuaTeX equipped with such 
> abilities one day ? I read in the LuaTeX reference that LuaTeX comes 
> with modules such as LuaZIP that is really a good thing. Do you think it 
> would be possible to have something like the LuaXML module added to 
> luatex too ?

this is not so much related to luatex (typesetting engine) but more to 
the input which can be anything (tex, database, xml, whatever); context 
does not use libraries but does xml in pure lua

adding all kind of 'modules' to lua will make it way too big and 
unmaintainable (apart from philosophical debates about which of the many 
variants to choose)

in the future there will be an option to load libraries (once we've 
sorted out the best way to deal with it in a secure way in the tex tree 
etc) but even then maintainance of libraries is not part of luatex 
itself (the exceptions are the libs we really need for typesetting, like 
fontforge which are also adapted to luatex and therefore part of the 
kernel; luazip and luasocket somehow fit in the core but database 
connectivity, xml handling etc is way off)

Hans


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