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<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label luatex</title>
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<h3>PDFTeX becomes 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;
development of new facilities continues, but the limitations of the
present structure impose a strong limit on what facilities are
possible.  (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 this context, the idea of LuaTeX arose.
<a href="http://www.lua.org/"><i>Lua</a></i> is a script
language, designed to offer an interpreter with a very small
&ldquo;footprint&rdquo;, so it is rather easy to build it into other
applications.  So LuaTeX was launched as a PDFTeX
executable with a <i>Lua</i> interpreter built into it.
<p/>A <a href="http://www.luatex.org/">LuaTeX project</a> is now proceeding
(with monetary support from various sources) and is pursuing avenues
that many of the other
current projects have in their sights, notably Unicode character
representations and support for OpenType fonts.  Work is also in hand
to integrate the extensions pioneered by <a href="FAQ-omegaleph.html">Aleph</a>.
<p/>The next release of TeX Live (due in July 2008) and MiKTeX
version 2.8 (no current release date) will incorporate LuaTeX.
ConTeXt distributions can already make use of it.
<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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