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I'm successfully using ConTeXt in a radar data evaluation and reporting project for more than ten years where a C++ based generator reads data from binary Matlab files and combines/formats them into perfectly layouted reports automatically. It's an impressive technology and if the users don't mind to have an extra ConTeXt installation on their system (which grows pretty large), the solution is perfect.

For my present project, I would like to start "from first principles" and not just add layers on top of things I don't fully understand. Thanks for the CLD document. I have read it when I started the mentioned project. I have no doubt from my own experience that the typesetting quality is excellent. But I consider using Lua for such large-scale achievements a mistake for architectural, maintainability und eventually performance reasons. The "flexibility" of this approach is payed with a high price.

1 comments

> I'm successfully using ConTeXt […]

Ah, nice! ConTeXt certainly isn't the solution to every problem, but it solves lots of the common complaints about LaTeX, and most people have never heard about it, so I always try and advertise it when I see a problem that seems like a good fit.

> if the users don't mind to have an extra ConTeXt installation on their system (which grows pretty large)

> For my present project, I would like to start "from first principles"

> But I consider using Lua for such large-scale achievements a mistake for architectural, maintainability und eventually performance reasons.

Well I personally disagree regarding Lua :), but all your points are very fair. Most people who say "I'm going to write my own typesetting system" severely underestimate the difficulty, but it sounds like you have a pretty good handle on the situation, so I'm rather hopeful that you'll accomplish your goal.

Once you're able to typeset something, we'd gladly accept a progress report at TUGboat [0], since this is a topic that lots of people are interested in but very few have accomplished.

[0]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/

Concerning Lua: there are approaches for years to add static typing to Lua, but from my point of view (as a language developer) none was really good when compatibility with Lua on language level (such as TypeScript vs. JavaScript) is a goal. With my own languages I only reused the engine without Lua compatibility, and the resulting language is much better suited for large-scale software engineering. But the approach based on LuaJIT turned out to be too brittle, so I switched to the CLI Mono engine, which is much faster (factor two) and much more stable.

> Once you're able to typeset something, we'd gladly accept a progress report at TUGboat

Currently I try to find out whether a Pascal based typesetting language with static typing would be worthwhile or not. Otherwise I will likely implement something like Typst (the latter is actually the reason I started this journey because it is for one part a much better language than TeX, but for the other part the typesetting quality is much worse, and this doesn't seem to change for years when looking at the roadmap).