Hi Ulrike, Am 01.08.2012 um 12:13 schrieb Ulrike Fischer <ne...@nililand.de>:
> Am Wed, 1 Aug 2012 09:32:16 +0200 schrieb Keith J. Schultz: > >> From the simple user side. LuaTeX is about as easy as it gets. For >> most purpose I can teach you all you need to know how to use Lua >> for TeX in 2 hours! > > The problem are the people inbetween: The people who should develop > the code needed on top of the binary. As you could see in this > discussion the core problem currently is the handling of (open type) > fonts. And while the fontloader lua code in context (the source of > luaotfload) is quite advanced, it is undocumentated, has no sensible > api, and can change all the time in unexpected ways. Nobody outside > the context team can actually work on it and e.g add support for > scripts or correct bugs. That is probaly teh biggest turn off to LuaTeX. They should some people in as far as coding is concerned. The missing documentation is something I would call a cardinal offense. > (As an aside I think that one should not only put pressure on > xetex/luatex/open type engines to support all sorts of open type > features and scripts but also on some scripts to adapt a bit to the > computer age.) You have my vote, though I do not need them. Ignorance of the need for scripts or advance is one of the reasons we are in the TeX-mess we have. Knuth can no be blamed. Back then you programmed differently. Today, everything should be modular and extensible. > > > >> It's price for unicode support and using fontspec. But, >> those ancient packages using encodings should be a thing of the >> past, IMHO. > > Well in case of chess fonts they are not "a thing of the past". Not > because of some deficiency of luatex or xetex but because most > glyphs used e.g. by chessboards are not in unicode. You need some > local encoding to access them in a standarized way, and this means > you need the ability to reencode fonts. This should be possible with > luatex (and is in my eyes one of the advantage compared to xetex) > but can't be used due to the unclear state of the font loader. Please, do not get me wrong. I am not talking about the fonts! Just that if there is no necessity not to use unicode, unicode should used. Grüß Keith -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex