PDFTeX and LuaTeX
As is said elsewhere in these FAQs, development of
PDFTeX is “in essence” complete —
no new facilities are being developed. The PDFTeX team has
announced that they have frozen PDFTeX in its current state
(version 1.49.10), and that nothing but bug corrections will be
provided up to the time of the final release, PDFTeX 1.50.0.
In parallel with the running-down of PDFTeX development,
development of a new system, LuaTeX is under way.
Lua is a script
language, designed to offer an interpreter that may be incorporated
into other applications. LuaTeX consists of a TeX-like engine
with a lua interpreter built into it; the lua
interpreter has access to many of the data structures used for
typesetting, and the user may also interpolate chunks of
lua code into their (La)TeX macros, or as ‘call-backs’
for use when the TeX-like engine does certain operations.
This arrangement offers the prospect of a “semi-soft” typesetting
engine: it will have its basic behaviour, but the user gets to
redefine functionality if an idea occurs — there will be no need to
persuade the world first, and then find a willing developer to work on
the sources of of the distribution.
The LuaTeX project is (with monetary
support from various sources) pursuing avenues that many of the other
current projects have in their sights, notably Unicode character
representations and support for OpenType fonts. The intention is
to integrate the extensions pioneered by Aleph.
Version 0.50.0 of LuaTeX is intended to at least demonstrate the final
functionality; it was released near the end of December 2009. Much
work remains to be done, and this remains a beta-release.
TeX Live 2009 incorporates (at the time of writing) LuaTeX
version 0.44.0, but the latest MiKTeX (version 2.8) still doesn’t
offer it.
ConTeXt ‘Mark 4’ can already make use of LuaTeX; much of its
code already appears in two forms — a TeX-based version
(.mkii
) and a ‘.mkiv
’ version. LaTeX is also
steadily acquiring macro packages in support of its use.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=luatex