On 2013-03-14, Liviu Andronic wrote: > On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 7:06 AM, leonid baranov ><leonidbaran...@gmail.com> wrote: >> 4. >> Given (1,2,3), what would be a compelling reason to prefer >> the Tex-fonts + pdfLatex over XeTeX/LuaTeX?
> Several thoughts: - Multi-lingual multi-script documents are a niche - the majority of users write in one (or maybe two) languages, mainly just using Latin script. For them, 1,2,3 does not apply. > - XeTeX typesetting is in my experience inferior to pdflatex typesetting Do you mean the missing microtypography support? OTOH, microtypography is not natively supported by LyX (you need to activate it in the LaTeX preamble). - Packages that play with Postscript no longer work (psfrag, pstricks etc). > - For multilingual documents, TeX fonts encodings may quickly become a > nightmare. XeTeX/LuaTeX plays much nicer since they're natively > unicode > - I'm not sure what's the status of XeTeX/LuaTeX "babel" equivalent > (polyglossia, I think). Last time I tried I couldn't get it to work Polyglossia and its support in LyX work reasonably well nowadays. OTOH, there is work on babel to get it working with both traditional and Unicode-aware TeX engines. http://www.ctan.org/pkg/babel-beta > - pdflatex is stable and has be around for ages, while XeTeX/LuaTeX > are quite new and may still be evolving XeTeX is no longer supported, LuaLaTeX is still beta code. - Speed. pdflatex is far faster > - Most TeX fonts available in LyX are high-quality, while with > XeTeX/LuaTeX you're free to choose as ugly a font as you will (tip: > try Comic Sans) - By default, also Xe- and LuaTeX use TeX fonts for maths. Mixing these with non-CM fonts may look bad. There is the experimental unicode-math package that can use OpenType math fonts (Microsofts Cambria and a small selection of OpenSource ones). http://www.ctan.org/pkg/unicode-math > So it all really boils down to a trade-off, and a choice of what works > fine for you. Günter
