I am just shooting an idea to see if this makes sense to the community.
I am looking to see if there is a possibility of taking a slightly new direction where Tectonic is going.
Instead of Tectonic being a TeX/LaTeX implementation can it become and generic typesetting engine with many frontends out of which one can be TeX/LaTeX in a compatible way while also providing improvements over TeX/LaTeX in being able to define new front ends easily. Though TeX/LaTeX compatibility is maintained where possible provide improved alternatives where compatibility does not matter.
Different from ends can be defined for:
- TeX/LaTeX/ConTeXt
- DocBook
- XSL-FO
- SGML
- OOXML/ODF/RTF
- etc.
wih the possibility of interformat convertion like: TeX/LaTeX/ConTeXt <–> OOXML/ODF/RTF
Also perhaps language bindings can be provided for Native, .Net and Java so this can be used as a library.