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Date:         Sat, 1 Jan 2011 13:09:23 -0800
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From: Paul Thompson <patjah@SBCGLOBAL.NET>
Subject: Re: LaTeX3 and engines
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What sort of documentation is available for \pdfstrcmp?  I confess that I have 
never heard of this toolset.

 Paul Thompson


________________________________
From: Joseph Wright <joseph.wright@MORNINGSTAR2.CO.UK>
To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
Sent: Sat, January 1, 2011 2:56:24 PM
Subject: Re: LaTeX3 and engines

On 01/01/2011 20:43, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> Just wondering, what benefit pdftex have over luatex (with the later
> being an extension of the former), or is it about people who are not
> willing/can't switch to new engine? Do we expect such people to be
> welling/able to switch to latex3 either?

At present there is not too much of an issue: we don't have any working 
functionality for LaTeX3 where this question really shows up. This may change 
once we have some font stuff. (As I said, I have some ideas in this area, which 
include 'shameless rip-off fontspec'.)

There is quite a large body of stuff which doesn't really need LuaTeX: stuff in 
western European languages using fonts already available to TeX. I suspect that 
forcing this subset of work to drop pdfTeX, which is quite capable of doing the 
job, might be consider a bit 'over the top'.

As I said earlier, we decided to require \pdfstrcmp after some applications came 
up where the alternatives were a bad idea (difference in expandability with 
different supported engines). So this might change as we develop more code. I 
can only comment on what we have now, where there is no strong case for dropping 
support for pdfTeX. (Indeed, almost all of the day-to-day testing I do uses 
pdfTeX as it remains my default engine. LuaTeX is a lot slower, I'm afraid, 
quite apart from questions about bugs introduced by the ongoing changes.)
--
Joseph Wright

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<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:verdana,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt">What sort of documentation is available for \pdfstrcmp?&nbsp; I confess that I have never heard of this toolset.<br><div>&nbsp;</div>Paul Thompson<div><div style="font-family: verdana,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br><div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><font face="Tahoma" size="2"><hr size="1"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> Joseph Wright &lt;joseph.wright@MORNINGSTAR2.CO.UK&gt;<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Sat, January 1, 2011 2:56:24 PM<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Re: LaTeX3 and engines<br></font><br>
On 01/01/2011 20:43, Khaled Hosny wrote:<br>&gt; Just wondering, what benefit pdftex have over luatex (with the later<br>&gt; being an extension of the former), or is it about people who are not<br>&gt; willing/can't switch to new engine? Do we expect such people to be<br>&gt; welling/able to switch to latex3 either?<br><br>At present there is not too much of an issue: we don't have any working functionality for LaTeX3 where this question really shows up. This may change once we have some font stuff. (As I said, I have some ideas in this area, which include 'shameless rip-off fontspec'.)<br><br>There is quite a large body of stuff which doesn't really need LuaTeX: stuff in western European languages using fonts already available to TeX. I suspect that forcing this subset of work to drop pdfTeX, which is quite capable of doing the job, might be consider a bit 'over the top'.<br><br>As I said earlier, we decided to require \pdfstrcmp after some
 applications came up where the alternatives were a bad idea (difference in expandability with different supported engines). So this might change as we develop more code. I can only comment on what we have now, where there is no strong case for dropping support for pdfTeX. (Indeed, almost all of the day-to-day testing I do uses pdfTeX as it remains my default engine. LuaTeX is a lot slower, I'm afraid, quite apart from questions about bugs introduced by the ongoing changes.)<br>--<br>Joseph Wright<br></div></div></div>
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