Use TeX's power without TeX macros[edit] With the Lua-part in LuaTeX you have access to most of TeX's capabilities for creating PDF documents. Most of the LuaTeX reference manual is about this topic. Remember that you can jump into Lua mode from TeX with \directlua{...Lua code...}. For example this plain TeX document prints the first digits of the value of pi: $\pi = \directlua{ tex.print(math.pi)