The history of luaTEX 2006–2009 / v 0.50 - Pragma ADE

limitations) and only need to run over the le once. And Lua is incredibly fast in loading
the tables where we keep track of these things. For instance, a test le storing and reading
10.000 complex positions takes 3.2 seconds runtime with LuaTEX but 8.7 seconds with
traditional pdfTEX. Imagine what this will save when dealing with huge les (400 page
300 Meg les) that need three or more passes to be typeset. And, now we can without
problems bump position tracking to milions of positions.
resources
Finding les is somewhat tricky and has a history in the TEX community and its distributions.
For reasons of packaging and searching les are organized in a tree and there are
rules for locating les of given types in this tree. When we say
\input blabla.tex
TEX will look for this le by consulting the path specication associated with the letype.
When we say
\input blabla
TEX will add the .tex sufx itself. Most other letypes are not seen by users but are dealt
with in a similar way internally.
As mentioned before, we support reading from other resources than the standard le system,
for instance we can input les from websites or read from zip archives. Although this
works quite well, we need to keep in mind that there are some conicting interests: structured
search based on type related specications versus more or less explicit requests.
\input zip:///archive.zip?name=blabla.tex
\input zip:///archive.zip?name=/somepath/blabla.tex
Here we need to be rather precise in dening the le location. We can of course build
rather complex mechanisms for locating les here, but at some point that may backre
and result in unwanted matches.
If you want to treat a zip archive as a TEX tree, then you need to register the le:
\usezipfile[archive.zip]
\usezipfile[tex.zip][texmf-local]
\usezipfile[tex.zip?tree=texmf-local]
The rst variant registers all les in the archive, but the next two are equivalent and only
register a subtree. The registered tree is prepended to the TEXMF specication and thereby
may overload existing trees.
How Lua ts in 17