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by Rochus 164 days ago
Just wanted to say that I skipped LuaTex 1.10 because not even a bare Hello World worked. So I switched to LuaTex 1.18 including the HarfBuzz library. I even implemented my own OTF loader in C (with Lua bindings for additional required HarfBuzz functions) and added it to the LuaHBTex executable. The font loading works, and also the layout in principle, but the result is ugly. So I came to the conclusion that there is still a lot of Lua and TeX code required to get the famous LuaTeX typographic quality, and there is little chance to get it with only the LuaHBTeX engine itself.

For that reason I now left LuaTeX altogether and re-start with my own implementation of the Knuth algorithms based on HarfBuzz, FreeType, MicroTeX and Cairo. For the time being I limit the typesetting to western languages (LTR-only), which I hope allows me to get a working MVP version in a few months.