[OS X TeX] MetaTeX: pdfTeX, XeTeX, Aleph, MetaPost and LuaTeX come together
Bruno Voisin
bvoisin at mac.com
Wed Jan 10 05:26:19 EST 2007
In relation to the matter of LuaTeX that was briefly mentioned in the
recent thread "[OS X TeX] Save date-time, not Print date", people
might find interesting the interview of Taco Hoekwater at <http://
www.tug.org/interviews/interview-files/taco-hoekwater.html>: it
discusses the LuaTeX project, its schedule, its relation to pdfTeX,
MetaPost, Aleph and XeTeX, and the planned emergence of a MetaTeX at
some point in the -- probably distant -- future (as well as
Elsevier's perception of TeX, the role of TUG and local user groups,
among other interesting things).
Much of it is probably too technical for non-geeks, but there are
also very practical and understandable views like:
"PdfTeX aims for the absolute best quality and as much
configurability as possible. Therefore, it does all typesetting tasks
everything itself, often at the expense of more source code and
therefore longer development cycles. XeTeX aims for the highest ease
of use for users and economy of implementation. Therefore, it uses
external libraries for some of its tasks. The result is that XeTeX is
not able to do micro-typography like pdfTeX, and pdfTeX is way behind
XeTeX when it comes to oriental script support."
Bruno Voisin
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