LuaTeX is a

TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

-based computer

typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other symbols).Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random ...

system which started as a version of

pdfTeX __NOTOC__ The computer program pdfTeX is an extension of Knuth's typesetting program TeX, and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product by Hàn Thế Thành as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of I ...

with a Lua scripting engine embedded. After some experiments it was adopted by the

TeX Live TeX Live is a cross-platform, free software distribution for the TeX typesetting system that includes major TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts. It is the replacement of its no-longer supported counterpart teTeX. It is now the def ...

distribution as a successor to pdfTeX (itself an extension of

ε-TeX TeX Live is a cross-platform, free software distribution for the TeX typesetting system that includes major TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts. It is the replacement of its no-longer supported counterpart teTeX. It is now the defa ...

, which generates

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems ...

s). Later in the project some functionality of

Aleph Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Hebrew , Aramaic , Syriac , Arabic ʾ and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez . These lette ...

was included (esp. multi-directional typesetting). The project was originally sponsored by the Oriental TeX project, founded by Idris Samawi Hamid,

Hans Hagen Hans Hagen (born 1953) is a professor of computer science at the University of Kaiserslautern Technical University of Kaiserslautern (German: ''Technische Universität Kaiserslautern'', also known as TU Kaiserslautern or TUK) is a public resea ...

, 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 Hard coding (also hard-coding or hardcoding) is the software development practice of embedding data directly into the source code of a program or other executable object, as opposed to obtaining the data from external sources or generating it at ...

new features in TeX itself, users (or macro package writers) can write their own extensions. LuaTeX offers support for

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...

fonts with external modules. One of them, written in Lua, is provided by the LuaTeX team, but support for complex scripts is limited; there is work in progress to allow

HarfBuzz HarfBuzz (loose transliteration of Persian calque ''harf-bāz'', literally "open type") is a software development library for text shaping, which is the process of converting Unicode text to glyph indices and positions. The newer version, ''N ...

as an alternative rendering engine. A related project is MPLib (an extended

MetaPost MetaPost refers to both a programming language and the interpreter of the MetaPost programming language. Both are derived from Donald Knuth's Metafont language and interpreter. MetaPost produces vector graphic diagrams from a geometric/algebra ...

library module), which brings a graphics engine into TeX. The LuaTeX team consists of Luigi Scarso, Taco Hoekwater, Hartmut Henkel and

Versions

The first public beta was launched at TUG 2007 in

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...

. The first formal release was planned for the end of 2009, and the first stable production version was released in 2010.LuaTeX roadmap
/ref> Version 1.00 was released in September 2016 during ConTeXt 2016. Version 1.12 was released for TeXLive 2020. , both ConTeXt mark IV and

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

with extra packages (e.g. luaotfload, luamplib, luatexbase, luatextra) make use of new LuaTeX features. Both are supported in

2010 with LuaTeX 0.60, and in

LyX LyX (styled as ; pronounced ) (Based on 3 developers, they say it can be pronounced "Licks", "Lucks" and "Leeks") is an open source, graphical user interface document processor based on the LaTeX typesetting system. Unlike most word processors, ...

. Special support in plain TeX is still under development.

External links

LuaTeX official site

LuaTeX Wiki

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Luatex Free PDF software Free TeX software Lua (programming language)-scriptable software TeX

Objective of the project

Versions

See also

Further reading

External links

References