I've just published my first LaTeX package!

Countwords is a simple package for counting words in LaTeX documents. Words are counted into a standard LaTeX counter, which can then printed (or otherwise manipulated) in all the normal ways. You can stop and counting whenever you want, and have multiple independent counters.

It's on CTAN here: https://ctan.org/pkg/countwords

P.S. credit to Philipp Gesang @phgsng for the original lua wordcount code.

#TeXAndLaTeX #lualatex #luatex

And finally, babel 25.14 simplifies how to declare languages. Something like \usepackage[marathi]{babel} is enough, without provide=*. Remember lazy loading is often better for handling secondary languages.

https://latex3.github.io/babel/news/whats-new-in-babel-25.14.html

#texlatex #luatex #xetex #multilingual #babel #typesetting

Standard interchange image format for Open Source DTP

Hi people,

with all the mayor GUI #DTP software reaching their peak: #GIMP, #Scribus and #Inkscape; and the well established #TeX software #ConTeXt and #SpeedataPublisher, and #ImageMagick we need a serious discussion about which image format we should adopt that works seamlessly across all these applications and it is generally accepted in the press workflow, whereas is embedded or not into a PDF file.

It should be something that has good quality, supports #CMYK and Alpha channels and it is #opensource friendly and perhaps an #openstandard.

I would dare to say that perhaps jpeg2000 matches most of them, it exists from a very long time and can be adopted as common ground, however it is need a combined effort, if what I am writing makes sense for you.

ImageMagick supports it, Gimp 3 currently doesn't, #LuaTeX and #LuaMetaTeX neither. I guess that Inkscape once it will be able to export in CMYK it will decide which format using to store images in CMYK with alpha into a PDF.

It would be very beneficial if we can adopt a format that works everywhere and it is press friendly, thanks.

@saxnot There are several reasons. One of them is #xetex lacks a true #bidi model. But more importantly, #luatex provides tools for #PDF not available in #pdftex or #xetex. A couple of links: https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/05/engine-news-from-the-latex-project • https://latex3.github.io/babel/guides/migrating-xetex-luatex.html

#texlatex

Just wondering how can I persuade #chatgpt and #copilot that #babel does fully support #Unicode and #OpenType, and works seamless with #luatex and #xetex. 😖

#multilingual #texlatex

Now that #luatex is the recommended engine for LaTeX, you can find in the #babel site minimal localized documents for about 300 languages ​​and 45 scripts. There are also basic guides on how to migrate from #pdftex and #xetex.

#multilingual #texlatex #localization

https://latex3.github.io/babel/guides/index-locale.html