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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label luatex</title>
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<h3>PDFTeX and LuaTeX</h3>
<p/>As is said elsewhere in these FAQs, development of
<a href="FAQ-whatpdftex.html">PDFTeX</a> is &ldquo;in essence&rdquo; complete &mdash;
no new facilities are being developed, since the limitations of the
present structure mean that the returns on effort invested are
diminishing.  The PDFTeX team has announced that no further
developments will be added after the release of PDFTeX 1.50.0,
which will be the next major release.
<p/>In parallel with the running-down of PDFTeX development,
development of a new system, LuaTeX is under way.
<a href="http://www.lua.org/"><i>Lua</a></i> 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 <i>lua</i> interpreter built into it; the <i>lua</i>
interpreter has access to many of the data structures used for
typesetting, and the user may also interpolate chunks of
<i>lua</i> code into their (La)TeX macros, or as &lsquo;call-backs&rsquo;
for use when the TeX-like engine does certain operations.
<p/>This arrangement offers the prospect of a &ldquo;semi-soft&rdquo; typesetting
engine: it will have its basic behaviour, but the user gets to
redefine functionality if an idea occurs &mdash; 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.
<p/>The <a href="http://www.luatex.org/">LuaTeX project</a> 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 <a href="FAQ-omegaleph.html">Aleph</a>.
<p/>A release of LuaTeX whose functionality is declared (version 0.50)
has recently appeared.  TeX Live 2008 incorporates an early release
of LuaTeX, and the upcoming MiKTeX version 2.8 (no current
release date) will probably incorporate LuaTeX.  ConTeXt
distributions can already make use of LuaTeX.
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=luatex">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=luatex</a>
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