Re: Prefer luatex for documentation

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

On Sat, 2022-11-19 at 10:19 +0000, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> In https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/merge_requests/1714 I
> suggest that we prefer luatex for building the documentation.  What
> do people think?

What I'm missing here is the bigger picture: Are we going to continue
adding support and switching between TeX engines one after the other?
If we prefer LuaTeX, should we stop looking for XeTeX? (As mentioned in
the merge request, we want pdfTeX because it's fast and included by
default in Ubuntu's texlive-bin / the Docker images).

> The main advantage of using luatex is complete microtype support;
> this was activated recently in `texinfo.tex`, and XeTeX doesn't
> support it in its entirety, lacking font expansion.

But pdfTeX does support font expansion, right? Reading through the
'microtype' package documentation, it reads as if all of this comes
from pdfTeX...

> The microtype feature yields (a) less underfull lines (i.e., less
> lines with overly large inter-word spaces), (b) less hyphenation, and
> (c) a better 'grayness' of the pages, thus increasing legibility.
> While (c) is not a big issue with technical documentation, (a) has
> quite an impact IMHO, and (b) is valuable since it is always a good
> thing to avoid hyphenation with keywords and the like because there
> might be misunderstandings whether the hyphen is part of the keyword
> or due to the line break.

Do you have an example for this? As I wrote on the merge request, I've
been looking through the PDFs you provided, and it's really hard to
find places where this actually makes a difference...

So in general I have the feeling that this doesn't bring us much, but
just keeps adding more checks to our configure and more choices /
configurations to test on a somewhat regular basis. I'm not really in
favor.

Jonas

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