Tim Cross writes: > Juan, if I understand your proposal correctly, I think your on the right > track. It sounds like what you are proposing would have almost no impact > on basic users like me, but would allow those with more demanding > requirements to adjust without too much effort. I originally raised the > question regarding what would need to change with the switch to uatex to > ensure that we do actually get things positioned to enable people to > exploit the benefits and not just switch out one tool for another which > only appears to be a little slower. I think what you are suggesting > addresses that concern.
Tim, thanks a lot for your interesting comments. Indeed, I think that LuaTeX is a good direction for the TeX ecosystem. And it seems that the third edition of The LaTeX Companion makes the way clear: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/612573/the-latex-companion-3rd-edition/612586 Of course, LuaTeX is still a kind of cyborg (someone defined it that funny way :-). TeX has not been rewritten here from scratch (that would have been preferable), but LuaTeX has brought, in my opinion, two revolutionary things: being able to control TeX internals from a scripting language as light and minimalist as Lua (which drastically influences the creation of packages every increasingly powerful and sophisticated for all areas) and the fact that TeX is finally native unicode. From the latter, of course, follows the fact that the user is no longer dependent on Computer Modern and can choose whatever font he wants, just like in any other modern textual software, from a simple word processor to more advanced tools like InDesign-style dtp programs. Even though pdfTeX was light years ahead of InDesign, this simple operation of choosing the font or font family has always been horribly difficult in LaTeX. There were a few packages that incorporated specific font families (Times, Fourier, etc.), but if one wanted to manually install Adobe Garamond in pdfTeX ---for example---, the process became absurdly long and cumbersome. Now in LuaLaTeX and XelaTeX that is as simple as doing it in libreoffice. Of course, TeX and LaTeX have always had their historical typeface, Computer Modern, which is almost like one of their distinguishing features. This extreme reliance on Computer Modern has often given people who don't use LaTeX the misconception that any document made in LaTeX always looks the same. Despite the fact that I feel enormous admiration for Donald Knuth, and I believe that to a greater or lesser extent many or almost all of us are indebted to him, I believe that the design of Computer Modern is not good and has many legibility problems (imho), especially legibility screen (precisely because of its Didot-style design, with such a marked contrast between the strokes). Since there is a thread on this list about accessibility, it's worth remembering that Computer Modern isn't exactly an easy-to-read font. Of course, you have to put things in their historical context. When TeX was created there was nothing similar to what we have today in fonts, there was no truetype or opentype, there were no free fonts either. It was all to do. And, naturally, if one creates "a new typesetting system intended for the creation of beautiful books" (Texbook page 5, Preface), it would be somewhat strange if this new typesetting system were born without a typeface to show the world the excellence of TeX. For that reason Knuth created Metafont and the Computer Modern font. Now with LuaTeX and XeTeX choosing the font, any font, is easy, fast and trivial. > but as I said, I know nothing.... I don't think so. Knowing (or not knowing) things or facts (after all, all of this is just "data") is not the same as being wise and speaking wisely :-) Best regards, Juan Manuel