[XeTeX] From LaTeX to XeLaTeX

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Hi all,

I'm afraid this is an FAQ, but I didn't manage to find the answers on the
internet or in some doc.

I'm currently a LaTeX user, and I want to try XeTeX (from TeXlive 2007, on
linux platform) in order to use OpenType fonts and get native support for
utf-8. I have a few questions, falling in the two following categories:

1. What changes do I need to do in my curent documents in order to
have them compile with XeLaTeX?

- From what I understand now, I have (of course) to remove fontenc and
inputenc packages. I also need to use fontspec and xunicode packages. The
xltxtra package seems to be recommended (and coud be used alone, since it
loads fontspec en xunicode too).

- The default encoding is now UTF-16 or UTF-8: I should use
\XeTeXdefaultencoding or XeTeXinputencoding for sources in an other encoding
(but I dont think I want to do that, I like utf-8).

- Lmodern becomes the default font (it was my default font allready, sort of).
So I need no longer use the lmodern package. I guess other font-relevant
packages (such as mathptmx) become irrelevant too, but I'm not sure: how about
the math fonts?

- Am I missing something else?


2. Is there any compatibility issues with major packages?

- For example, anything closely related to pdfTeX features, like the microtype
package, should not work... Due to the compilation mode, I think anything
relying on PostScript (such as PSTricks) should fail too.

- How about hyperref and babel?

- Am I missing some other important thing?


Thanks in advance!

Manuel.