[XeTeX] From LaTeX to XeLaTeX

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

Hi Manuel,

I am too transitioning between latex and xelatex so I
may have some answers.

> 
> 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).

Yes, anything to do with input character coding and
font encoding are not needed. Fontspec allows you to
choose fonts easily, but it is not a necessity; I
don't think xunicode is a necessity. If you only have
latin(-like) characters in your doc, fontspec is
optional.

> 
> - 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).

Simply save as UTF-8, that's all.

> - 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?

AFAIK the latin modern fonts have math symbols, but
for equations etc you still need amsmath. If you want
to use an opentype font for math, that should be
possible, provided that the font has glyphs available
for all the math symbols.

> 2. Is there any compatibility issues with major
> packages?
> 

Not that I know. If you have a lot of latex docs with
eps figures, xelatex is a bit of a nuisance because it
will only include pdf or png (maybe tiff?). I also
don't know about packages that specifically tweak PS
specials, like powerdot. I'm assuming those things
don't work because xelatex uses xdvipdfmx, and not
dvips -> ps2pdf.

Regards,
Wilfred

> 
> - How about hyperref and babel?
> 
> - Am I missing some other important thing?
> 
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> 
> Manuel.
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