On 01/01/2011 20:43, Khaled Hosny wrote: > Just wondering, what benefit pdftex have over luatex (with the later > being an extension of the former), or is it about people who are not > willing/can't switch to new engine? Do we expect such people to be > welling/able to switch to latex3 either? At present there is not too much of an issue: we don't have any working functionality for LaTeX3 where this question really shows up. This may change once we have some font stuff. (As I said, I have some ideas in this area, which include 'shameless rip-off fontspec'.) There is quite a large body of stuff which doesn't really need LuaTeX: stuff in western European languages using fonts already available to TeX. I suspect that forcing this subset of work to drop pdfTeX, which is quite capable of doing the job, might be consider a bit 'over the top'. As I said earlier, we decided to require \pdfstrcmp after some applications came up where the alternatives were a bad idea (difference in expandability with different supported engines). So this might change as we develop more code. I can only comment on what we have now, where there is no strong case for dropping support for pdfTeX. (Indeed, almost all of the day-to-day testing I do uses pdfTeX as it remains my default engine. LuaTeX is a lot slower, I'm afraid, quite apart from questions about bugs introduced by the ongoing changes.) -- Joseph Wright