On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 3:30 PM, Mojca Miklavec <[email protected]> wrote: > That last part will be super tricky. > > I have no clue how you could possibly support typesetting without > shipping any fonts or some basic files. I'm not saying that you need > to depend on a working 4 GB installation of TeX Live or that you need > to use TDS, but you *will* need some subset of files somewhere, you'll > probably have to install some small subset of TeX Live tree along with > your package in any case.
It’s possible to support a quite a few use cases without needing any TeX related files. * We can still leverage Lua code available in the standard Lua installation (LuaRocks modules, other places in LUA_PATH etc) to make up for any loss of functionality in terms of code. We do not strictly need to use TeX macro packages. I know the TeX ecosystem is huge and cannot be replaced easily, but it is still in the realm of possibility to provide equivalent functionality using Lua. * If we invoke LuaTeX with `--ini` we can eliminate the need for any format files, and hence the need for any TEXMF trees. * LuaTeX's font.define function to define a font directly. It is possible to load OpenType fonts directly from the filesystem using the LuaTeX’s fontloader API, and define a font using them. Consumers of the API can have OpenType font files in their working folder for their specific typesetting requirements. * It is also rely on fonts bundled in the OS. We can have a LuaRocks module (it does not exist yet, but it’s possible to write one) that can locate fonts on an OS, and use them. Deepak
