Hi Philipp,
and I personally jumped straight into xelatex because the internet told me it
was the only unicode-aware flavour of TeX
That is not correct, LuaTeX is Unicode-based as well.
Sure, but LuaTeX wasn't around five years ago. To make matters worse, it
only publically available with the release of TeX Live 2010, and even
then the LuaTeX team gives the projected "stable" date as sometime 2012.
To make matters worse, the website quite literally says "you can use it,
but you're on your own", meaning that it's not recommendable as a TeX
flavour someone new to the process should start with. It just makes it a
cool project to contribute to while it marches on towards version 1, and
I'm sure we're all very much looking forward to it being stably done,
but in the mean time it's a project in development. Once it's no longer
a "you're on your own" version, the choice between Xe(La)TeX and LuaTeX
will become a real choice.
It's not at all "ridiculously easy." There is still no stable OpenType math or
microtypography on XeTeX.
Of course, and I would urge you to suggest what alternatives people have
- these deserve mention in the documentation as alternatives to
Xe(La)TeX for people to whom those features are dealbreakers.
- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
nihongoresources.com
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