On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 06:04:13AM +0530, Shriramana Sharma wrote: > > The great thing about the XeTeX concept is that it doesn't try to do > > everything itself. It uses the best available components to do the > > heavy-lifting. > > And that's what is in line with the Unix philosophy write? Code-reuse? > > I'd have been happy if ConTeXT with its provisions for fine > typographic control would have continued to support XeTeX in its > further development, but well the developers have decided to make it > monolithic and based on Lua, so that's their call.
LuaTeX was developed for ConTeXt (it was Hans idea, even the very choice of Lua was because he was using it somewhere else and liked it), so no surprises here. If the kind of stuff MkIV is doing was possible without LuaTeX, they wouldn't have started it. That being said, it is not impossible to integrate HarfBuzz and Graphite into LuaTeX (it can use external binary modules), but it is unlikely to be part of LuaTeX proper because they want as few external dependencies as possible (and XeTeX has shown that external dependencies are not without cost). I feel you frustration, I'd like see everyone move to HarfBuzz (even non-free software), and have as less incompatibilities as possible (it is a nightmare to develop a moderately complex OpenType font and get it to work the same everywhere), but different projects have different philosophies and one has to understand this. Regards, Khaled -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
