[XeTeX] description of the XeTeX mailing list

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 5/4/06, Steven Shaviro wrote:
>
> I subscribed here because I have just started using XeTex.
>
> I hesitated over doing this, because once I make the switch there is
> really no going back -- I am aware that xunicode.sty provides
> backwards compatibility for older LaTeX documents, but once I write
> new documents taking advantage of XeTeX's unicode features
> (particularly with regards to things like quotation marks and foreign
> letters with diacritical marks) it would be a hassle to return to the
> older, straightforward LaTeX (not to mention that the documents will
> no longer cross platforms transparently, on the rare occasions that I
> need to use a Windows machine).

I don't know about LaTeX (I don't use it any more except while fixing
minor things in other's documents), but I don't see any reason why
documents in ConTeXt wouldn't be compatible for both: cross-platforms
and different TeX engines. (The only "serious" difference I see is
[one] line selecting the font which might be different for choosing a
font residing in TeX tree and the font installed on the system. But
then again: once pdfTeX will understand OpenType fonts, this tiny
difference will go away again.)

For me the "there was no going back" moment was when I switched from
LaTeX to ConTeXt.

About the things that you mentioned:

- quotation marks: in ConTeXt you're supposed to use \quote{something}
and \quotation{something} anyway. That will take some care about
spacing, hyphenation, line-breaking, ... But if you type the proper
unicode characters, that will work as expected in both pdfTeX and
XeTeX. (I don't use them because it's difficult to type them in and
because I might want to switch from "quotes" to >>guillemots<< one
day; this is more trivial with \quote{} than with hardcoded quotation
marks.)

- foreign letters with diacritical marks: there are (at least) three
ways of typing them in in ConTeXt, just an example would be: {\v c},
{\ccaron}, {č}, where braces stand here only for clarity. The fourth
way is to let XeTeX handle the accents (that won't work properly for
Type1 fonts however), but in any case the best way to type them in is
simply using Unicode, so there is no real difference in the way you
work with XeTeX and pdfTeX.

- cross-platform & Windows: I understood that Windows version of XeTeX
will come out sooner or later. If you use OpenType fonts, you can use
them under "any" operating system.

Sure, there are many LaTeX packages which will probably work only with
one flavour of TeX engine, esp. if the author won't bother rewriting
them (a nice example are PSTricks which still don't quite work even
with the most frequently used engine, pdfTeX).

If you're really seeking for "no-way-back" solutions, go for ConTeXt!
Not because you wouldn't be able to go back, but because you will not
want to.

Mojca