[texhax] bibtex

[Paul Isambert]

Selon Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de>:

> On 17 August 2010 Susan Dittmar wrote:
>  > Do you have any hints for me where I should start if I would like to use
>  > lualatex instead?
>
> The best introduction is:
>
>   http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/pil2/
>
> This book is really worth its money.  The first edition of the book
> (describing Lua 5.0) is available online:
>
>   http://www.lua.org/pil/
>
> The tutorials are very helpful too:
>
>   http://lua-users.org/wiki/TutorialDirectory
>
> The LuaTeX manual describes LuaTeX specific extensions.

I share Philipp and Reinhard's enthusiasm for LuaTeX and I use it everyday.
However, sorry for the pessimism, there's no good introduction to LuaTeX yet.
Reinhard's link is excellent indeed (and let's add the reference manual:
http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/), but it won't tell you how to use LuaTeX. And
the LuaTeX manual is minimalist and not very beginner-friendly, which may be
explained by the fact that, well, there are other things to do for the time
being.

To my knowledge, and I'd be very glad if anybody proved me wrong, there's only
one way to LuaTeX for the moment, and that's the hard one. Experiment, try to
understand, ask questions on the mailing list, and trust time. Now for a
somewhat more cheerful note: that's what I've done, and now I'm a very happy
LuaTeX user -- even though my general education in programming was close to zero
(well, it's a bit better now). So it can be done.

And I'd add that what you need to understand LuaTeX is not so much being good at
Lua than exploring how TeX works: Lua mastery won't help if a list of nodes
means nothing to you. (This point of view might just stem from the way I use
LuaTeX, though.)

Ah, and a definitive upbeat note: LuaTeX is hard, but you are more than rewarded
using it. It's so [insert f-word here] powerful!

Paul