Re:LaTeX3 Automatic Labels for Fun and No Profit
by svat on Tuesday March 19, 2024 @10:45AM
(#39756226)
> Then the LuaTeX devs moved their efforts to LuaMetaTeX and I found myself scratching my head.
This makes sense: They're essentially “done” with LuaTeX; it works fine and is distributed with TeX Live; it's up to others to use it. Many people are in environments (submission to journals that insist on pdfTeX etc) where they cannot use LuaTeX; the LuaTeX developers cannot change that. (It has minor differences from TeX/pdfTeX but they don't seem keen to fix it.) Meanwhile for those who are willing to use a new system, they might as well simplify (remove the backward-compatibility requirements) and make a better typesetting system more suited to the needs of ConTeXt.
In other words, users can be divided into:
- those who insist/need to use pdfTeX + LaTeX
- those who are willing to try something different, for which there's ConTeXt (with lmtx) or (further afield) Typst, etc.
This makes sense: They're essentially “done” with LuaTeX; it works fine and is distributed with TeX Live; it's up to others to use it. Many people are in environments (submission to journals that insist on pdfTeX etc) where they cannot use LuaTeX; the LuaTeX developers cannot change that. (It has minor differences from TeX/pdfTeX but they don't seem keen to fix it.) Meanwhile for those who are willing to use a new system, they might as well simplify (remove the backward-compatibility requirements) and make a better typesetting system more suited to the needs of ConTeXt.
In other words, users can be divided into:
- those who insist/need to use pdfTeX + LaTeX
- those who are willing to try something different, for which there's ConTeXt (with lmtx) or (further afield) Typst, etc.