Am 11.09.2010 um 20:27 schrieb Michiel Kamermans: > 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.
Not as a bare engine, but as with the classical TeX engines, it is usually sufficient to have high-level packages that hide the details. I suspect that only a tiny majority of XeLaTeX users know the XeTeX primitives because the fontspec package abstracts away from them. Of course the relative stability of XeTeX's Unicode and OTF routines compared to LuaTeX is a big advantage of XeTeX. >> 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. - pdfTeX-based LaTeX is still a very good choice for maths-heavy documents written in Latin scripts. If you only have a few non-ASCII text characters, Unicode is nice but not an absolute requirement. If you want your formulas to match the body font, you are pretty much limited to very few fonts that have comprehensive math support, so the usefulness of the availability of all system OpenType fonts in XeTeX is greatly diminished. OpenType Math is still in a very early stage in XeTeX and has so many bugs that it is not ready for production use. The microtype package is primarily designed for pdfTeX and LuaTeX, and the XeTeX support is not released yet and still in an early stage. - Much progress has been made during the past few months in the area of LuaLaTeX: the fontspec and the microtype packages have been extended to LuaTeX, and the unicode-math package shows great potential. - Of course ConTeXt mustn't be ignored. ConTeXt Mk IV, which is based on LuaTeX, seems to have everything that is missing from LaTeX: a stable, coherent interface, a well-designed architecture that makes LaTeX-style hacking and package clashes unnecessary, XML support, micro-typography, OpenType math, and much more. In most respects it's several decades ahead of LaTeX. I've noticed that newbies have been mentioned several times in this thread: perhaps beginners should ignore LaTeX altogether and use ConTeXt exclusively. -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
