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This ancient implementation of TeX is still widely used, but note that there were historically many other implementations, and the current one is LuaTeX, togeth

by nsajko 6y ago

This ancient implementation of TeX is still widely used, but note that there were historically many other implementations, and the current one is LuaTeX, together with its experimental fork called LuaMetaTex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX https://www.pragma-ade.nl/general/manuals/luametatex.pdf https://www.pragma-ade.nl/general/manuals/luametatex.pdf Similarly, the (less) ancient LaTeX is still widely used, in spite of the existence of the (not so new, but still actively developed) ConTeXt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt

andrepd 6y ago
You are confusing some things. LaTeX is a set of macros written in TeX, as is ConTeXt. TeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, and LuaTeX, are all TeX compilers. LuaTeX is not "the current one" in any meaningful way. The most widely used one is pdfTeX.
- nsajko 6y ago
  I don't see what things am I confusing. But I should have been more clear: when I said that LuaTeX is current, I was referring to how it's still being actively developed. AFAIK pdfTeX and XeTeX get just the occasional bug fix.
  - anthk 6y ago
    That's not a signal of being used at all. PDFlatex is the most widely used (La)TeX system. You newcomers confuse "new" as "widely used" and that's not the case at all. Unix utilities are old as hell and they are used daily, far more than exa and fd.
    - nsajko 6y ago
      You misread me, I specifically referred to the older variants as widely used, in contrast to the (somewhat) newer, more developed ones.
coliveira 6y ago
LuaTeX is in no way the "current implementation", it is one of the modern extensions of TeX, but the core is still the same. By the way, Knuth wrote TeX in a dialect of Pascal, and the original code has been automatically translated to C and used in all modern versions.
gus_massa 6y ago
No. This is the canonical implementation written and maintained by Knuth himself. Now there are a few alternative implementations. Wikipedia list: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PdfTeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PdfTeX * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XeTeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XeTeX I think all of them have more features like better Unicode support, but probably also more bugs.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  For various languages - at least Farsi, Arabic and Hebrew - the common wisdom and vast majority of users (AFAICT) have moved or are moving to XeTeX as the compiler. The polyglossia package, which is the modern replacement of babel, requires XeTeX. IIANM, the effective Unicode + multi-language support of the other two is not at the same level.
  - nanna 6y ago
    I don't actually think LuaTeX is capable of even handling right to left languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi. Only XeLaTeX is. Or am I wrong?
    - svat 6y ago
      I think LuaTeX may have been sort-of capable for a while (with enough effort/workarounds by the user), but in 2019 or earlier, there was some work (initially by Khaled Hosny, who was also one of the major XeTeX maintainers a while ago) to have LuaTeX use HarfBuzz. (See http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-1/tb124hosny-harfbuzz.pdf http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-1/tb124hosny-harfbuzz.pdf) So (after some more work by the LuaTeX team) there's a LuaTeX variant called LuaHbTeX, which is the program invoked (since TeX Live 2020) when you write `lualatex`. The end result is that, to the best of my knowledge, LuaTeX can handle many of these things just as well as XeTeX. (See http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb127fischer-bangla.pdf http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb127fischer-bangla.pdf for an article from 2020, focusing on the case of the Bangla script, which is not right-to-left, but like all Indic/Brahmic scripts has some other issues related to complex text layout.)

by nsajko 6y ago

andrepd 6y ago

You are confusing some things. LaTeX is a set of macros written in TeX, as is ConTeXt. TeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, and LuaTeX, are all TeX compilers. LuaTeX is not "the current one" in any meaningful way. The most widely used one is pdfTeX.

nsajko 6y ago
I don't see what things am I confusing. But I should have been more clear: when I said that LuaTeX is current, I was referring to how it's still being actively developed. AFAIK pdfTeX and XeTeX get just the occasional bug fix.
- anthk 6y ago
  That's not a signal of being used at all. PDFlatex is the most widely used (La)TeX system. You newcomers confuse "new" as "widely used" and that's not the case at all. Unix utilities are old as hell and they are used daily, far more than exa and fd.
  - nsajko 6y ago
    You misread me, I specifically referred to the older variants as widely used, in contrast to the (somewhat) newer, more developed ones.

coliveira 6y ago

LuaTeX is in no way the "current implementation", it is one of the modern extensions of TeX, but the core is still the same. By the way, Knuth wrote TeX in a dialect of Pascal, and the original code has been automatically translated to C and used in all modern versions.

gus_massa 6y ago

No. This is the canonical implementation written and maintained by Knuth himself. Now there are a few alternative implementations. Wikipedia list: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PdfTeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PdfTeX * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XeTeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XeTeX I think all of them have more features like better Unicode support, but probably also more bugs.

einpoklum 6y ago
For various languages - at least Farsi, Arabic and Hebrew - the common wisdom and vast majority of users (AFAICT) have moved or are moving to XeTeX as the compiler. The polyglossia package, which is the modern replacement of babel, requires XeTeX. IIANM, the effective Unicode + multi-language support of the other two is not at the same level.
- nanna 6y ago
  I don't actually think LuaTeX is capable of even handling right to left languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi. Only XeLaTeX is. Or am I wrong?
  - svat 6y ago
    I think LuaTeX may have been sort-of capable for a while (with enough effort/workarounds by the user), but in 2019 or earlier, there was some work (initially by Khaled Hosny, who was also one of the major XeTeX maintainers a while ago) to have LuaTeX use HarfBuzz. (See http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-1/tb124hosny-harfbuzz.pdf http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-1/tb124hosny-harfbuzz.pdf) So (after some more work by the LuaTeX team) there's a LuaTeX variant called LuaHbTeX, which is the program invoked (since TeX Live 2020) when you write `lualatex`. The end result is that, to the best of my knowledge, LuaTeX can handle many of these things just as well as XeTeX. (See http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb127fischer-bangla.pdf http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb127fischer-bangla.pdf for an article from 2020, focusing on the case of the Bangla script, which is not right-to-left, but like all Indic/Brahmic scripts has some other issues related to complex text layout.)