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LuaTeX

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LuaTeX
Original author(s)Taco Hoekwater, Hartmut Henkel, Hans Hagen
Developer(s)Taco Hoekwater, Hartmut Henkel, Hans Hagen, etc. (7 active developers)
Initial release2007; 17 years ago (2007)
Stable release
No stable releases yet.
Preview release
0.78.2 / January 13, 2014; 10 years ago (2014-01-13)
Repository
Written inLua, C
Operating systemMultiplatform
TypeTypesetting
LicenseGNU General Public License
Websitewww.luatex.org

LuaTeX is a TeX-based computer typesetting system which started as a version of pdfTeX with a Lua scripting engine embedded. After some experiments it was adopted by the pdfTeX team as a successor to pdfTeX[1][2] (itself an extension of eTeX,[3] which generates PDFs). Later in the project some functionality of Aleph was included (esp. multi-directional typesetting). The project was originally sponsored by the Oriental TeX project, founded by Idris Samawi Hamid, Hans Hagen, and Taco Hoekwater.

Objective of the project

The main objective of the project is to provide a version of TeX where all internals are accessible from Lua. In the process of opening up TeX much of the internal code is rewritten. Instead of hard coding new features in TeX itself, users (or macro package writers) can write their own extensions. LuaTeX offers native support for OpenType fonts. In contrast to XeTeX, the fonts are not accessed through the operating system libraries, but through a library based on FontForge.

A related project is MPLib (an extended MetaPost library module), which brings a graphics engine into TeX.

The LuaTeX team consists of Taco Hoekwater, Hartmut Henkel and Hans Hagen.

Versions

The first public beta was launched at TUG 2007 in San Diego. The first formal release was planned for the end of 2009, and the first stable production version was released in 2010.[4] It was expected to reach version 1.00 in 2012[5][6] but as of September 2013 it hasn't even been announced yet.

As of October 2010, both ConTeXt mark IV and LaTeX with extra packages (e.g. luaotfload, luamplib, luatexbase, luatextra) make use of new LuaTeX features. Both are supported in TeX Live 2010 with LuaTeX 0.60. Special support in plain TeX is still under development.

Further reading

References

  1. ^ TeX Frequently Asked Questions - What is PDFTeX?
  2. ^ TeX Frequently Asked Questions - PDFTeX and LuaTeX
  3. ^ PDFTeX's NEWS file - news for 3.141592-1.40.0 version.
  4. ^ LuaTeX roadmap
  5. ^ Hans Hagen "The State of LuaTeX". Dante 2009 (pdf)
  6. ^ LuaTeX documentation
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