LuaMetaTeX

[Bruno Voisin]

Just a question out of sheer curiosity, after Hans Hagen's new article about LuaMetaTeX in the latest TUGboat 42(1), following his earlier article about LMTX in TUGboat 40(1).

If I understood things correctly, LuaMetaTeX is a general-purpose TeX engine (version 2 of LuaTeX), and LMTX is the new version of ConTeXt based on it. So I was wondering, is the integration of LuaMetaTeX planned in TeX Live at some point?

I just had a quick look. There are downloads at <https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Installation>, containing install scripts which download all required components and compile formats so that you end up with a working ConTeXt setup.

But nothing is said about whether LuaMetaTeX could run plain TeX or even LaTeX, and if so how. LuaMetaTeX binaries can be downloaded from

https://lmtx.pragma-ade.com/install-lmtx/tex/

One can then attempt to create formats, not using fmtutil

fmtutil: running `luametatex -ini   -jobname=luametatex -progname=luametatex luatex.ini' ...
startup error : no format file given, quitting

apparently because fmtutil uses -ini while luametatex seems to only recognize --ini

% luametatex -ini luatex.ini 
startup error : no format file given, quitting

% luametatex --ini luatex.ini
startup error : missing find_log_file callback

But then some initializations seem to be missing (find_log_file is new in LuaMetaTeX, wasn't in LuaTeX 1), of the type done possibly in temf-dist/tex/luatex/lualibs, and this is no small endeavour.

So I was just wondering, again out of sheer curiosity, is such work planned in TeX Live at some point?

Bruno Voisin