While I’m technically spending as little time as possible on TeX development at the moment, I’m still keeping an eye on things around the place. (In some cases, having to fix bugs comes as a rather time-critical priority now that users are updating very frequently with tools such as tlmgr or MacTeX’s ‘TeX Live Utility’.)

Over on the TeX branch of Stack Exchange (still yet to be named, although I favour ‘overfull-hbox.com’), I’m currently experimenting with a way to replace my current lack of attention on my documentation with community-contributed material.

The background to this is that LuaTeX’s font loading through luaotfload allows OpenType fonts to be augmented at load time with new features and updated information such as kerning. I’d love to be able to document this feature properly in fontspec, but the problem is that I don’t have time to learn about it and write it up in the detail that it deserves. So I’ve opened up a question on StackExchange asking how to do this (‘changing kerning of a font in LuaLaTeX’) with the request that the answer come in the form of a patch to the fontspec manual.

I don’t know if anyone’s going to reply, but there’s a bounty of 400 reputation points going for it if anyone does. (You get 10 reputation points for each upvote on a question or answer you post on the site). The reputation system is an indicator of your participation on the site, so the reward is essentially just good karma — but I hope this can perhaps be a useful way to muster the community so that users who otherwise might not be able to contribute with the code can still help out with the non-technical aspects of putting together a package. You’d be surprised how long it takes to write good documentation!