Lua in TeX

Abstract

At the end of 2023 the Lua language celebrated its 30^th anniversary and in that perspective I offered to wrap up our experiences with that language in the perspective of developing TeX follow ups called LuaTeX and LuaMetaTeX. I also discuss the interplay between them and ConTeXt, an advanced macro package for TeX. For those unfamiliar with TeX I start with an overview of what that system is. Because TeX cannot do much out of the box, users normally combine it with a so called macro package, such as Plain TeX, LaTeX or ConTeXt, where the later one is what I use and whose developers also drove the development of LuaTeX and LuaMetaTeX. The usage of Lua was a natural choice due to its performance and easiness to integrate, beyond the fact that Lua is independent of additional resources. To illustrate the discussion, I present examples that show the interaction between TeX and Lua.