[Aleph] OpenType-to-TeX and other musings...

[Javier Bezos]

Hans:

Thank you for your explanation. Indeed, pdfetex is growing 
very fast and it's extending etex with new useful primitives,
I presume thanks to the collaboration with both the context
and latex teams -- without it, any attempt to improve tex is
doomed to fail. 

I had a look at Lua. It's simple and small, but apparently
strings are 8 bit (but I presume that can be fixed).

> 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

Great. Recently, I had resumed my work on Mem, but I'm going
to pause it again since pdfetex is a promising project.

Cheers
Javier


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hans Hagen" <pragma at wxs.nl>
To: "Discussions concerning Aleph" <aleph at ntg.nl>
Sent: Wednesday, December 21, 2005 9:45 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: Re: [Aleph] OpenType-to-TeX and other musings...


> 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.
> 

> 
> 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
> >_______________________________________________
> >Aleph mailing list
> >Aleph at ntg.nl
> >http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/aleph
> >  
> >
> 
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