LuaTeX format with extended plainTeX macros

Petr Olsak, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026

 Cesky

optex-doc.pdf

tex-nutshell.pdf
optex-math.pdf
omls.pdf
op-catalog.pdf
op-slides.pdf
Tugboat articles [1] [2] [3]

Discussion forum for users

Packages documentation:
math, mte, minim-mp, pdfextra

OpTeX at github (current)
Releases:
optex-120.zip (21 May 2026)
optex-119.zip (24 Feb 2026)
optex-118.zip (26 May 2025)
optex-117.zip (25 Feb 2025)
optex-116.zip (10 Dec 2024)
optex-115.zip (28 Jun 2024)
optex-114.zip (14 Feb 2024)
optex-113.zip (16 Nov 2023)
optex-112.zip (24 May 2023)
optex-111.zip (9 Mar 2023)
optex-110.zip (9 Feb 2023)
optex-109.zip (3 Dec 2022)
optex-108.zip (4 Aug 2022)
optex-107.zip (17 May 2022)
optex-106.zip (11 Mar 2022)
optex-105.zip (28 Jan 2022)
optex-104.zip (26 Aug 2021)
optex-103.zip (03 Jun 2021)
optex-102.zip (25 Apr 2021)
optex-101.zip (18 Mar 2021)
optex-100.zip (09 Feb 2021)
optex-19.zip (14 Jan 2021)
optex-18.zip (21 Dec 2020)
older

Links:
Tips, tricks, howto
OpTeX at github
OpTeX mailing list
FTP site, history
CTUstyle for OpTeX

OpTeX is a LuaTeX format (LuaHBTeX format since 2025) based on Plain TeX macros (by Donald Knuth). The main features are:

OpTeX should be a modern plain TeX with power from OPmac (fonts selection system, colors, external graphics, references, hyperlinks...) with Unicode fonts.

• OpTeX keeps the simplicity (like in plain TeX and OPmac macros).
• There are no old obscurities concerning various 8-bit encodings and various engines. We are using only Unicode and only LuaHBTeX.
• OpTeX provides a powerful font selection system (for Unicode font families, of course).
• OpTeX supports hyphenations of all languages installed in your TeX system.
• All features from OPmac macros are copied (for example, you can see opmac-prospectus.pdf)
• Macros are documented in the same place where code is.
• Documentation of all features is at single place.
• The user namespace of control sequences is separated from internal namespace of OpTeX and primitives (\foo versus \_foo).

TeXlive includes OpTeX in its last version released at CTAN. You can process your document by optex document. Try optex op-demo for example. If the optex command is not present, try to run luahbtex -fmt optex op-demo.

You can run OpTeX on-line at Overleaf: you can start from this project.

If you have (an old) TeX distribution without OpTeX, you need LuaHBTeX in version 1.10.0 (2019) or later, luaotfload package 3.12 or later, and you can install OpTeX manually:

   unzip optex-(version).zip
   cd optex/base
   luahbtex -ini optex.ini

The format file is generated. Copy the optex.fmt file somewhere to your TeX system where format files can be read by LuaHBTeX. Copy *.opm files to a directory where LuaHBTeX can read them. You can process your document by luahbtex -fmt optex document.tex or you can create an alias with name optex (to luahbtex -fmt optex) in your system.

Documents

• User documentation + technical reference of OpTeX is in optex-doc.pdf.
• A brief summary of TeX and plain TeX is in tex-nutshell.pdf.
• Summary about math in TeX, plain TeX, and OpTeX is in optex-math.pdf.
• Slides in OpTeX can be prepared by op-slides.pdf.
• Fonts registered by OpTeX macros are catalogized in op-catalog.pdf. You can prepare it by \fontfam[catalog] \bye. Then it shows only fonts registered in OpTeX macros and ready in your system.
• OpTeX markup language standard OMLS declares "standard" control sequences for OpTeX documents and their syntax. It should help to program converters from/to OpTeX documents.
• The article OpTeX -- A new generation of Plain TeX was published in TUGboat 41:3 in 2020.
• The article Comparison of OpTeX with other formats: LaTeX and ConTeXt was published in TUGboat 42:1 in 2021.
• The article Creating macros in OpTeX was published in TUGboat 44:1 in 2023.

Announcement of version 1.00

February 2021

I published OpTeX for the first time a year ago. Intensive developmnet took place during that time. I collected many reports from users and implemented new features. Thanks for all that reports.

Now, OpTeX has reached a stable state, in my opinion. I wish to offer users the certainty of the immutability of basic principles of OpTeX so that they can create their macros. This is time to release version 1.00 of OpTeX and to remove the word "beta" from the name of the version.

I plan to continue fixing bugs but I will be very careful not to violate basic features on which users can build their macros. Before I add eventually a new feature, I will think about the change in detail with regard to this principle.

Enjoy!

License

Public domain. More precisely, it is the same as for OPmac macros.

Other relevant software by various authors

• unibidi-lua implements bidi algorithm of the ConTeXt to OpTeX, LuaTeX, LuaLaTeX (by Udi Fogiel).
• lua-widow-control Automatically remove widows and orphans from any document (by Max Chernoff).
• Interface for minim and tikz packages (by Michal Vlasák). It is part of OpTeX files in pkg/ directory.
• lualineno provides flexible line numbering (by Udi Fogiel).
• OpTeXcount -- a basic python script that analyzes OpTeX source code and counts words (by Richard Hartmann).
• PanOpTeXum -- converting documents to OpTeX by pandoc (by Jan Martínek).
• Language definition file for the GNOME environment for OpTeX syntax highlighting in text editors (by Hlaváč Jan).
• OpTeX Sublime Package for OpTeX syntax highlighting in Sublime Text editor (by Pilař Daniel).
• pdfextra -- a macro package which enables more special PDF features: audio, video, transitions, ... (by Michal Vlasák).
• Background grid for OpTeX documents (by Adam Barla).
• Another slides style for OpTeX \slides (by Filip Rund).
• OpTeX for VSCode enables syntax highlithing of OpTeX sources in VSCode and Snippets (by Filip Spelina).