### PDFTeX becomes LUATeX

As is said elsewhere in these FAQs, development of PDFTeX is “in essence” complete — development of new facilities continues, but the limitations of the present structure impose a strong limit on what facilities are possible.

Thus arose the idea of LUATeX. LUA is a script language, chosen because its interpreter has a very small “footprint”, so it is rather easy to build it into other applications. So LUATeX was launched as a PDFTeX executable with a LUA interpreter built into it.

The LUATeX project is now proceeding (with monetary support from various sources) and is pursuing avenues that many of the other current projects have in their sights, notably Unicode character representations and support for OpenType fonts. Work is also in hand to integrate the extensions pioneered by Aleph.

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=luatex