Digital Typography in the New Millennium: Flexible Documents by a Flexible Engine

Abstract

The TEX family of electronic typesetters contains the primary typesetting tools for the preparation of demanding documents, and have been in use for many years. However, our era is characterized, among others, by Unicode, XML and the introduction of interactive documents. In addition, the Open Source movement, which is breaking new ground in the areas of project support and development, enables masses of programmers to work simultaneously. As a direct consequence, it is reasonable to demand the incorporation of certain facilities to a highly modular implementation of a TEX-like system. Facilities such as the ability to extend the engine using common scripting languages (e.g., Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.) will help in reaching a greater level of overall architectural modularity. Obviously, in order to achieve such a goal, it is mandatory to attract a greater programming audience and leverage the Open Source programming community. We argue that the successful TEX-successor should be built around a microkernel/exokernel architecture. Thus, services such as client-side scripting, font selection and use, output routines and the design and implementation of formats can be programmed as extension modules. In order to leverage the huge amount of existing code, and keep document source compatibility, the existing programming interface is demonstrated to be just another service/module.