Let me try again. On Sun, 11 Nov 2012, Michael Talbot-Wilson wrote:
a = img.new() a.filename = somename n = img.node(a) tex.setbox(8, n)
(where somename is a Lua string). I guess the prior question is, can the contents of a PDF file read by lua be placed in a TeX box? Or, can a lua string be used with pdftex syntax e.g. as the argument of \pdfximage? Or, if not, can image userdata obtained as above be placed in a TeX box by any other means? Or, if not, is there any way that luatex can place in a TeX box content from a file given that the file's name is available only as a lua string? It seems that the answer is No, No, No, No. Hence, silence. I guess the usual solution is to run LuaTeX twice, have lua write the data in the first run and \read1 to\somewhere in the second. Is that what you guys are doing? It's a pity there's no other way. There are many situations in which one wants to include information, e.g. when writing a letter, when you might want supply a person's name and have TeX get the address from the database. And that solution wouldn't be of much use for someone who wanted to print a stamp catalogue with images and descriptions of 5000 postage stamps. I guess what I need to do is use a preprocessor to do the lookups and write the TeX file. Some kind of private preprocessor language coming up, I think, to chew up my.pretex and spit out my.tex and run TeX on it. There are better languages than Lua for writing such a preprocessor. It would be nice if the LuaTex callbacks were keyed to TeX csnames. As it is, the documentation (beta 0.70.0) is impenetrable for anyone who is not a LuaTeX developer. open_read_file? What triggers a call of that? find_image_file (p. 34)? What can you write in TeX that calls that? What can TeX do with the actual_name returned? Did it define a macro accessible to TeX? Okay, don't say, President's eyes only, of course. I'll go away.
