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Notice that the TeX you have installed locally is many conversion steps removed from the WEB source. Pascal code is extracted from the WEB. Then the Pascal is
by jpfr 5y ago
Notice that the TeX you have installed locally is many conversion steps removed from the WEB source.
Pascal code is extracted from the WEB. Then the Pascal is translated into C. Afterwards, years of development have accumulated on that C source to handle utf-8, modern fonts, PDF output, etc.
Most work nowadays happens on top of LuaTeX that replaces and extends pdfTeX.
There are shockingly few people maintaining that core of the TeX environment.
The source control is mirrored here: https://github.com/TeX-Live/luatex/tree/experimental https://github.com/TeX-Live/luatex/tree/experimental
- svat 5y agoMinor correction: C code is extracted directly from the WEB. (web2c doesn't use `tangle`, the program that converts WEB to Pascal.) (Unless there's something I've missed…)
- jfk13 5y agoActually, the Web2C build process normally used these days (e.g. in TeX Live) does first run tangle, to convert the WEB source to Pascal. Then the web2c tool (along with a few helpers) translates that Pascal to C.
- smnrchrds 5y agoAre LuaTeX and pdfTeX forks? Or are they programs built on top of TeX itself? Will the changes in this new version make their way to the engines we use?
- jfk13 5y agopdfTeX was an extension to TeX (as was XeTeX), for a long time maintained as a collection of change-files applied to the canonical TeX source, although nowadays they're managed as separate WEB files. LuaTeX was in turn an extension of pdfTeX, but I think at this point it would be better described as a fork rather than an extension. (Though it's not clear to me exactly how to distinguish these concepts.) Anyhow, I believe the 3.141592653 updates have already been ported to all these engines.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]