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Message-ID:  <4D73CD52.4090800@yahoo.de>
Date:         Sun, 6 Mar 2011 19:07:14 +0100
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From: Philipp Stephani <st_philipp@YAHOO.DE>
Subject: Re: format?
To: LATEX-L@listserv.uni-heidelberg.de
In-Reply-To:  <4D73C1FC.4050907@gmx.de>
Precedence: list
Status: R

Am 06.03.2011 18:18, schrieb Arno Trautmann:
> 
> I find this horrible. It would be easy if the standard engine would be
> luaTeX with pdf output and other machines could be used as pdflatex3 or
> similar.

I agree that LuaTeX with PDF output is the most (only?) sensible choice,
but if the L3 team chooses to support legacy engines and output formats,
I have no objection to the proposed syntax with command line switches.
The main latex3 program will probably have to be a Lua wrapper script
anyway because of the things the engines won't do: re-running the engine
when needed, formatting error messages, computing the correct command
line arguments for the engine.

> 
>> an so forth (with --xetex ignoring --dvi for the obvious reasons).  Does
>> a similar scheme make sense for a hypothetical 'latex2x'? (I'm going
>> with 'x' for 'extended', and also for 'like LaTeX2e, but clearly a bit
>> further along. Of course, there would need to be some defaults for the
>> above - I guess I'd favour pdfTeX in PDF mode at present.
> 
> For l2x (I like the name!), I'd stick with the names as they are.

I don't know. I'd like to see latex2x using LuaTeX as default engine,
too. Since today LuaTeX already supports everything that pdfTeX and
XeTeX has (and much more), I see no point in using the old engines any
more if there is no need for backward compatibility. The only point for
pdfTeX is that LuaTeX is still beta, but since L2e will stay, I don't
see many problems here; LuaTeX is stable enough, and the l2x manual can
contain an appropriate warning.

> 
>> Second question: anything else that should be included that is not in
>> the combined 'release' material (expl3, xparse, xtemplate, xcoffins)?
>> These do load various bits and pieces (for example, graphicx), but I'd
>> like to at least add fixltx2e to the above.
> 
> As Philipp suggested, fontspec for luaTeX and XeTeX engines. Maybe even
> xltxtra for XeTeX and some lua packages for luaTeX? But that is no
> LaTeX3 stuff anymore …

expl3 already loads the luatex package. Maybe Heiko should be made a
honorary member of the L3 team, then the L2x format could include the
whole oberdiek bundle...
fontspec is written by Will who is a member of the L3 team, so that
would be no problem. It would essentially be NFSSv3 for LuaTeX.
xltxtra replaces kernel macros such as \textsuperscript, I think that is
not something we want by default.
fontspec loads luaotfload which depends on luatexbase. Currently there
are some conflicts between luatex and luatexbase that should be fixed.
Other packages by MPG would be nice, too, e.g. luacode.
If we think even further, the L3 team might choose to lift several
popular and high-quality packages to semi-official status by including
them in the format, e.g. Philipp Lehman's packages, mathtools, the
oberdiek bundle, xcolor, TikZ, siunitx...
Fixltx2e has already been mentioned and would probably the first
candidate for inclusion in the format.