TeXipedia

luatex

Provides an advanced TeX engine with embedded Lua scripting capabilities, Unicode support, and modern font handling while maintaining compatibility with traditional TeX.

Overview

Represents a significant evolution in TeX technology by combining traditional typesetting capabilities with modern features and extensive customization options.

  • Enables direct Lua programming within TeX documents for enhanced automation and complex document manipulation.
  • Offers native Unicode (UTF-8) support, making it ideal for multilingual documents and special character handling.
  • Supports modern font technologies including OpenType and TrueType for both text and mathematical content.
  • Popular in complex publishing workflows, digital typography projects, and documents requiring programmatic control.
  • Particularly valuable for users needing fine-grained control over typesetting processes or requiring integration with modern document workflows.

Getting Started

LuaTeX is a TeX engine, not a LaTeX package to be loaded with \usepackage. To use LuaTeX to compile your document:

  1. Create your LaTeX document as usual:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello, LuaTeX!
\end{document}
  1. Compile with the LuaTeX engine using the command:
lualatex document.tex

For LuaTeX-specific features, you may want to load packages that support LuaTeX, such as luacode or fontspec:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}  % For OpenType font support
\begin{document}
Hello, LuaTeX!
\end{document}