Luatex is always available with modern tex distros (say at least 5 yrs probably more). In fact pdftex _is_ luatex...
I feel texlive is a stable enough bet for people... L On Sat, 19 Nov 2022, 22:15 Jonas Hahnfeld via Discussions on LilyPond development, <lilypond-devel@gnu.org> wrote: > On Sat, 2022-11-19 at 10:19 +0000, Werner LEMBERG wrote: > > In https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/merge_requests/1714 I > > suggest that we prefer luatex for building the documentation. What > > do people think? > > What I'm missing here is the bigger picture: Are we going to continue > adding support and switching between TeX engines one after the other? > If we prefer LuaTeX, should we stop looking for XeTeX? (As mentioned in > the merge request, we want pdfTeX because it's fast and included by > default in Ubuntu's texlive-bin / the Docker images). > > > The main advantage of using luatex is complete microtype support; > > this was activated recently in `texinfo.tex`, and XeTeX doesn't > > support it in its entirety, lacking font expansion. > > But pdfTeX does support font expansion, right? Reading through the > 'microtype' package documentation, it reads as if all of this comes > from pdfTeX... > > > The microtype feature yields (a) less underfull lines (i.e., less > > lines with overly large inter-word spaces), (b) less hyphenation, and > > (c) a better 'grayness' of the pages, thus increasing legibility. > > While (c) is not a big issue with technical documentation, (a) has > > quite an impact IMHO, and (b) is valuable since it is always a good > > thing to avoid hyphenation with keywords and the like because there > > might be misunderstandings whether the hyphen is part of the keyword > > or due to the line break. > > Do you have an example for this? As I wrote on the merge request, I've > been looking through the PDFs you provided, and it's really hard to > find places where this actually makes a difference... > > So in general I have the feeling that this doesn't bring us much, but > just keeps adding more checks to our configure and more choices / > configurations to test on a somewhat regular basis. I'm not really in > favor. > > Jonas > >
