{"id":39,"date":"2011-01-02T16:11:19","date_gmt":"2011-01-02T16:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/?p=39"},"modified":"2013-11-28T08:57:26","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T08:57:26","slug":"luatex-turbocharged-tex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/?p=39","title":{"rendered":"LuaTeX: turbocharged TeX"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About a year ago I was Googling for information on how I could typeset my Arabic study notes (I&#8217;d been studying Arabic in my spare time for a few years). During my searches I came across a couple of videos published on the fabulous <a href=\"http:\/\/river-valley.tv\">River Valley web site<\/a>. The videos in question were presented by Professor Idris Hamid:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/river-valley.tv\/arabic-typography-past-present-and-tex\/\">Arabic typography: Past, present, and TeX<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/river-valley.tv\/dynamic-arabic-towards-the-philosophers-stone-of-arabic-script-typography\/\">Dynamic Arabic: Towards the philosopher\u2019s stone of Arabic-script typography<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Those talks demonstrated some truly incredible typesetting of Arabic, using OpenType fonts with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tug.org\/interviews\/hagen.html\">Hans Hagen&#8217;s<\/a> amazing <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.contextgarden.net\/Main_Page\">ConTeXt system<\/a> and a new TeX engine, called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.luatex.org\">LuaTeX<\/a>. It is not overstating the case to say that I was totally blown away; in short, being a geek, it completely &#8220;pinged my geek genes&#8221; and I just had to find out more about how this was being done. Little did I know that I would be parking my Arabic studies in favour of resurrecting my C programming.<\/p>\n<p>So, what makes LuaTeX so exciting? It is hard to say in just a few lines but, for me, the most exciting things are:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>It is being very actively developed by an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.luatex.org\/team.html\">amazing team of people<\/a>, including <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tug.org\/interviews\/hoekwater.html\">Taco Hoekwater<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tug.org\/interviews\/hagen.html\">Hans Hagen<\/a> and others.<\/li>\n<li>The integration of a real scripting language into the TeX engine. This language is called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lua.org\/\">Lua<\/a> (hence Lua + TeX).<\/li>\n<li>The ability to use OpenType fonts, including fonts with the MATH table.<\/li>\n<li>Unicode UTF8 for input.<\/li>\n<li>Access to TeX&#8217;s &#8220;innards&#8221;, such as node structures, linebreaking, page building and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.luatex.org\/svn\/trunk\/manual\/luatexref-t.pdf\">(PDF) a gazillion other things<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>You can extend it with plugins (i.e., DLLs on Windows, .so files on Linux etc).<\/li>\n<li>The <a href = \"http:\/\/foundry.supelec.fr\/gf\/project\/luatex\/scmsvn\/\">source code<\/a> can be downloaded at any time (via SVN) so you can build it yourself, yes including on Windows!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Over the course of the next few weeks and months I will post some tutorials on LuaTeX, based on what I&#8217;ve learnt over the last year or so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About a year ago I was Googling for information on how I could typeset my Arabic study notes (I&#8217;d been studying Arabic in my spare time for a few years). During my searches I came across a couple of videos published on the fabulous River Valley web site. The videos in question were presented by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-luatex"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3228,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/3228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}