Khaled Hosny wrote:
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 01:02:26PM +0800, Yue Wang wrote:
for LuaTeX. In ConTeXt world this is quite different, since Hans Hagen
is a Lua+TeX+fontforge+MetaPost+whatever expert. So unless there exist
several Hans Hagens in the LaTeX world, ordinary LaTeX users will not
benefit from LuaTeX development.
That is why I believe that we should have some means to share must of
the lower level Lua code across macro packages. For instance writing 2
or 3 OpenType layout modules is a waste of time, is it a big task of its
it depends ... in that respect writing two or more macro packages is
also a waste of time (or even different variants of tables within a
macro package etc)
concerning writing such an engine ... for me it's part of the fun (esp
in relation to the oriental tex project) and i'm kind of glad that in
context we can do it the way that suits context best (which in some
aspects can be rather different from the way latex does things; for
instance, we provide extra features on top of what the font does, have
rather context specific tracing options, etc); personally i start from
what users which kinds of determines the order of development (so,
currently arabic and a bit of cjk)
own especially if you want to cover all scripts, there exists 3 free
OpenType implementations and only one gets it almost right.
as i've said before, at some point i will provide a kind of generic
variant of the context open type support, but currently my priority lays
with getting the oriental projects related font support done (which is
an interplay between font design and handling features) [so, any generic
context code would be provided as-is and development driven via the
context related lists]; with the luatex project we're not that much in a
hurry anyway: we reimplement parts of tex, honouring the basic design of
tex, adding a few things only, and opening things up step by step;
after all, we have working pdftex's and xetex's so there is not that
much need to hurry, cook up half solutions, end up in incompatible patch
mode etc
also, even if much of the low level context mkiv lua code can be seen as
generic i foresee many problems in reuse simply bcause macro packages
differ in fundamental ways (otherwise there would not be different macro
packages at all); also, keep in mind that latex has functionality split
up over many packages, where redefining low level code is happening,
which in turn does not really help]
Hans
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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
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