References: <200902240018.n1O0IA428136@f7.net>
User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.0.60 (gnu/linux)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Message-ID:  <86ljrwb9o1.fsf@lola.quinscape.zz>
Date:         Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:01:34 +0100
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
From: David Kastrup <dak@GNU.ORG>
Subject: Re: "Microkernel" comments
To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
In-Reply-To:  <200902240018.n1O0IA428136@f7.net> (Karl Berry's message of "Mon,
              23 Feb 2009 18:18:10 -0600")
Precedence: list
Status: R

Karl Berry <karl@FREEFRIENDS.ORG> writes:

>     little reason to continue even with XeTeX. 
>
> Just for the record, even in the hypothetical future where LuaTeX has
> caught up to XeTeX in terms of system font access and Arabic
> typesetting, Jonathan K once spoke to me about another reason why
> XeTeX will very likely always have a place: good typesetting of other
> minority scripts.  Since everything in LuaTeX is being programmed from
> scratch, it seems highly unlikely it will ever support the variety of
> scripts that ICU et al. do.

It would seem to suggest itself to me that one part of dropping XeTeX as
a separate project would entail module loader and interfaces into ICU.
Ideally, one would have built-in support for the more important LuaTeX
targets, with seamless ICU fallbacks for the rest.

-- 
David Kastrup