Funding

The LuaTeX project is related to other projects in the TeX community. First of all it follows up on the pdfTeX project which over the past years has received some funding from user groups and individuals and companies.

Initial programming LuaTeX has been funded by:

• Oriental TeX Project, Colorado State University, Department of Philosophy (Idris Samawi Hamid): core reprogramming
• The NTG (Dutch Speaking Usergroup): funding for coding and related projects.
• TUG (TeX User Group): funding for coding and related projects.
• Dante (German User Group): funding for coding and related projects.
• CAPDM, distant learning programmes (represented by Duncan Hothersall): coding
• Patrick Gundlach: a donation that triggered buying a computer for testing on OS/X.
• Anonymous donations via the TUG webpage: complementary funding.
• The CritEd project that made it possible to further integrate LuajitTeX and cleanup some code.
• The swiglib project that provides a library framework.

Occasionally additional donations are made. Thanks to this sponsorship Taco could spend company time on merging the pdfTeX and Aleph code base and writing the necessarry extensions so that we had a decent working ocde base that we can build upon.

During the initial stage of LuaTeX development, although part of the coding was funded, most work was done pro bono: writing Lua (test) code, testing engine behaviour, discussions, documentation, promotion, etc. and this continues to be the case in current development. In the meantime we're talking of many man-years of development without compensation but we're quite satisfied by the progress that we made. Ongoing development and integration in TeXLive is currently done mostly by Hans and Luigi. Hans works at PRAGMA ADE that permits him to spend substantial time on LuaTeX as long as it doesn't interfere with other work.

We also need to mention here that thanks to Mojca Miklavec and her evergoing effort of keeping the ConTeXt garden and its hosted (LuaTeX/MkIV) distribution going, we can roll out updates so that users can test. The time and efforts she spends on this is incredible. We also thank those involved in TeXLive binary support for spending time on making this happen.

Programming the associated MetaPost library is funded by several user groups:

• Dante (german langauge)
• CSTUG (czech and slovak langauges)
• GUST (polish language)
• NTG (dutch language)
• TUG (international user group)

The necessarry Open Type Fonts are provided by the TeX Gyre project, most prominently sponsored by the same user groups.

The LuaTeX and MPlib project are coordinated by Taco Hoekwater (Elvenkind) and Hans Hagen (Pragma ADE). They are dedicating a considerable amount of company time to the development of LuaTeX. Per 2014 Luigi Scarso will be responsible for MPlib coding.

Of course, TeXies around the world put lots of time into these developments as well by testing what got implemented in macropackages. Thanks to them for testing and supporting the team.

Funding of for instance the font project is only possible because the user groups have members. In addition to journals, distributions (TeX Live), meetings and mailing lists, supporting projects are an important effort of local user groups (LUGS) and TUG. The international user group has a web page for donations

If you're a happy TeX user and not yet a member of a usergroup, consider becoming one. You can find the home pages of user groups here. It is at user group meetings that we normally present the lastest achievements.