Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by CatMtKing 4611 days ago
Coming from a position such as yours, here's how I interpreted it:

pdfTex will take TeX input and output PDF (and apparently other file formats as well).

LuaTeX should do the same (being a drop-in replacement), the difference being that it can also use Lua scripts to control how the output is formatted (versus everything being written in TeX).

1 comments

> pdfTex will take TeX input and output PDF

Ok, well, maybe I don't understand TeX at all, because I thought that's exactly what it did.

EDIT: Ahh, wait, I have it! When they say "extension" they mean "implementation"! They actually replace TeX as an engine. Is that right? So, luaTex is just an implementation of TeX written in Lua?