Fw: Re: [Aleph] OpenType-to-TeX and other musings...

[Hans Hagen]

Javier Bezos wrote:

>Any thoughts about this?
>  
>
thoughts indeed -)

Recently (most of) the pdftex team met in person and decided on the 
following:

- simplify code base (less change files)
- go 24/32 bits
- add open type support
- as well as unicode (utf) input

actually these things have been on the agenda for a while (due to open 
type fonts showing up) but now we've put a rough schedule to it

A parallel track (by hartmut, taco and me)  is to add lua (a lean, mean 
and cleverly designed language) as scripting engine to pdftex  We've 
done experiments and from talks at user group meetings i deduce that 
this seems like a good idea. We will present this feature at eurotex/tug 
2006. Apart from general scripting features we will provide access to 
the file io handler, tex's internals, a plug-in-the-hlist model and  
provide ways to manipulate the input as well (maybe not all is finished 
next year). This process will not interfere with general pdftex 
development; as said, we've done promissing experiments.

What this means for aleph ... we will discuss things with guisseppe when 
he's finished his thesis work; it may make sense to move right-left 
typesetting code from aleph to pdftex (or maybe it needs to be written 
from scratch, i.e. made cleaner from the perspective of document 
design); (my impression is that in aleph other typesetting directions 
are bugged anyway); so, if we have rl typesetting and an input handler 
(using lua) my guess is that  it can replace aleph for many tasks with 
the benefit of providing all the pdftex goodies. In the process some 
code cleanup and additional primitives will show up.

As with anything pdftex related, it's (1) to be done in a stable way, 
pdftex being the main engine nowadays, (2) provide downward 
compatibility, no problem with embedded lua since it does not interfere, 
and (3) do it as fast as possible without endless [blocking] discussions 
and (4) no false promisses ... so far we could manage that

Hans

>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "Hans Hagen" <pragma at .nl>
>Newsgroups: gmane.comp.tex.context
>Sent: Sunday, December 18, 2005 3:16 PM
>Subject: Re: Re: [Aleph] OpenType-to-TeX and other musings...
>
>
>  
>
>>Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>In the short run, for Aleph's purposes, these declarations and  
>>>much/most/all of the metainfo can be treated as "suggestions" for the 
>>>otp  designer to consider in implementing things. There is no need to 
>>>treat  them as something "holy".
>>>      
>>>
>>in the near future pdftex will provide open type as well as hooks for 
>>input processing using lua, so you may as well end up rewriting your 
>>otp's in a more friendly language
>>
>>Hans
>>    
>>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Javier
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