[XeTeX] XeTeX and luaTeX

[Arthur Reutenauer]

> Is there any kind of feature comparison between XeTeX and luaTeX?

  None that I know of.

>                                         My primary needs are, besides
> general (La)TeX functionality, Unicode processing of combining
> characters and handling of OpenType fonts. The output should be
> standard PDF.

  XeTeX can do that: Unicode and OpenType support are built-in, and you
can do Unicode normalization with the macro \XeTeXinputnormalization
(see http://www.gust.org.pl/bachotex/2008/presentations/XeTeX-BachoTeX2008-pres.pdf
page 9, for example).

>               For me personally, I haven't had the need to seek any
> special features.

  OpenType handling and combining characters were part of what I dubbed
“advanced features” in my first mail (they're advanced with respect to
pdfTeX), but they're already there anyway.

> I guess I need to learn a bit more about luaTeX so I'll know when or
> if I need to use it instead of XeTeX.

  In my opinion, it's too early to be using LuaTeX for production with
LaTeX (in contrary to ConTeXt, where developement is already a couple of
years old).  The packages are still very recent, you should give them
some time.  In particular, Unicode normalization won't work out of the
box with LuaTeX.

  Maybe Will wants to say a word about fontspec for LuaTeX at this point :-)

> Thanks again for the very useful brief on luaTeX.

  You're welcome!

	Arthur