On 12/17/2017 7:45 AM, Javier Bezos wrote:
Hans,
Javier (just dreaming of a merge of xetex and luatex...)
that dream will not come true ... the wole idea of luatex is not to hard
code things but to permit whatever solutions
I guess you are tired (understandably) of hearing things like
this. Actually I was thinking of projects/attempts to use harfbuzz
with luatex. Just to have the possibility to choose.
You can hook whatever library in via lua but in practice that doesn't
mean you get better results.
Concerning hb: here i can hook that into context already for a while
using plug mode but (1) users will loose quite some functionality that
we have now with fonts as it's one or the other (per font), and i'm not
eager to deal with discussions about that and support interferences; (2)
performance on latin is in most cases much slower, on complex arabic it
can be somewhat faster (also due to some dropped featurses in context
node mode) and on the average performance is worse; (3) the main reason
why we sometimes use it is in comparing output with uniscribe (which is
an option) as that is the de facto standard for rendering opentype and
there are curious border cases where the three methods (node node, plug
mode hb-native, plug mode hb-uniscribe) disagree with each other which
we then (read: idris in his font project) tries to work around, (4)
libraries create a dependency that can be a pain (esp when one has
different versions) and the less the better (ok, there's then a
dependency on lua but that is visible code that one can patch without
compilation)
Anyway, there's pdftex, xetex and luatex and each has its advantages
(speed, integration, flexibility) which is good i think. Just like i use
different operating systems and editors, i can also use different engines.
Hans
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