[Dev-luatex] REQ: Please tell comp.text.tex why LuaTeX chose embed rather than extend.

[Hans Hagen]

Jonathan Fine wrote:

> According to http://www.luatex.org, the "main objective is to provide an 
> open and configurable variant of TeX while at the same time offering 
> downward compatibility."  I don't see anything here that leads them to 
> prefer embed over extend.

these are you terms and definitions (and by now i've lost track of what 
embed vs extend is anyway) and i see no reason why we (as team) should 
prefer some kind of tagging (or discuss our preferences for whatever) 
... just wait till 2012 and beyond and see which of your tags you can 
apply then

> On the page http://www.luatex.org/roadmap/ I see
>     "allow Lua callbacks for file searching"
>     "Allow Lua scripts to control [...] font loading etc."
> and so forth.  These might be situations where embed would be preferred 
> to extend, but I'm not sure either way.

i don't know, but what i do know is that by embedding lua we could 
extend tex's file io subsystem so again we have no preference ... we're 
just doing something that suits our needs (which might differe from your 
needs for tagging)

>>> I think it would also be great to have a 'instant preview' front end 
>>> to TeX.
>>
>> I'm too looking forward for some thing like that, I even have some idea
>> that would be best implemented if we had such feature, and I know there
>> are many potentials for such extension.
> 
> Thank you for your encouragement and interest.  I really think this sort 
> of thing is a vital part of our future (along with something better than 
> the TeX macro language).

because in our daily work and usage we're talking of many-page documents 
it will never be instant and for special tasks like high end arabic 
(which is what we're playing with now) it's even dead slow but who cares 
as it's the quality that matters; the luatex project aims at a full 
blown tex, not some small subsystem;

at bachotek there was a talk about making a python tex library and we 
were told that less than 600 lines of tex the program were needed to do 
the job ... maybe you should focus on that approach then and forget 
about further embed/extend discusions on thsi forum as they are of no 
importance to the luatex project

end of thread ... second attempt: you asked us what it is embed or 
extend and by now it should be clear that we're not going to make a 
choice that makes you happy (and haunts us the coming years)

Hans


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