XeTeX: A modern LaTeX with proper OpenType and Unicode support

[teilo]

It was because of the poor font support in LaTeX that I gave up trying to use it many years back.

[And without fail, every time I make this claim, I get piled on by LaTeX die-hards -- please don't bother. It's a total PITA to get the fonts of your choice working properly in LaTeX. It SHOULD be as easy as referencing a font file or dropping a font in a directory, but it's not.]

XeTeX looks awesome. Finally, full, easy, natural OTF support through Freetype. Even AAT support on a Mac! Looks like I'm jumping back into the world of TeX.

[patrickg]

I suggest having a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX It is still in beta, but once the power of LuaTeX is unleashed, it will be the only used TeX engine (in two or three years). This is because it combines the quality of TeX's typesetting algorithms (+ unicode/opentype/...) with the ability to program in Lua, a very decent programming language. In "Lua mode", you have access to all TeX's internal parameters and algorithms, so you can even do the line breaking and pdf writing from inside lua. That means you don't have to use TeX's input language any more, a language that keeps many people away from using TeX. Now that you have everything on the Lua side, there is no reason why not to read XML, RTF, Wiki-Markup and other file formats and use the TeX algorithms to typeset these files.

TeX internally works with nodes. Every character you type, every space you use (like the space between paragraphs), every color command will be changed to a nodelist. The boxes and linebreaking algorithm operate on these nodes. In LuaTeX (in lua) you can create nodes manually and feed this list into the linebreaking algorithm and you get back a box of a perfectly nice typeset paragraph. Then you can even operate on these nodes again (or just before linebreaking) and ship out this paragraph into the pdf file. Nobody cares where you get the input from. There are several libraries included with LuaTeX and available for inclusion, such as LPEG (for really nice and sophisticated parsing), luasocket (internet access), luazip, etc. Even luaexpat (xml) and luasql (Database access) are available, so that makes LuaTeX perfectly suited for database publishing (which is what I am doing)

No other TeX engine can do that at the moment!

For the german speaking hackers, I am running the site

http://www.luatex.de

where I write technical stuff about LuaTeX (and some announcements), but beware: all in german.

[Edit: here is the site with google translation to english:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...

]

[asolove]

So let's say I am totally convinced, not by the programmability, but by the combination of unicode support and microtypography.

For LaTeX, everyone knows that to get professional output you just read through the two (!) manuals for the memoir class and then you know pretty much everything you need. Where do I start to make professional looking output with ConTeXt?

[jfb]

How is this news, exactly? I use it and love it every day, but ... eh.

EDIT: Well, I see it's turned someone back onto LaTeX, so good on the submitter, then.

[dmm]

OpenType? What's wrong with Computer Modern? ;)

[Silhouette]

I'm not a huge fan of Computer Modern's appearance, but as a practical font for typesetting math it's a work of genius.

Alas, there are hardly any other fonts that include the range of glyphs required for serious mathematical typesetting.

On the subject of XeTeX, fontspec, et al, while they do make using OpenType fonts much easier, alas they cannot magically create corresponding mathematical glyphs. They also, last time I used them, lacked decent support for setting equations using OpenType fonts, though the situation did seem to be improving so that may no longer be an issue.

Now, if someone wanted to sponsor the guys at some of the big font foundries to make matching mathematical glyphs to accompany some of the nice, professional-grade OpenType fonts they make, that would be fabulous, but probably a rather expensive bit of philanthropy given the niche market.

[imd]

That's like asking "What's wrong with pepperoni pizza?" Nothing's wrong with it, but I like lots of pizzas.

[expeditious]

CM is difficult on the eyes when you print it out with a laser printer. Thin lines within the glyphs are too thin.

Otherwise, it's beautiful.

[cracki]

so this is basically latex, with with support for unicode and difficult font features...

i'd love to see someone submit a different approach to writing technical documents. something that doesn't look like the macro system of latex, or a soup of XML tags.

[expeditious]

The least of my complaints about LaTeX is how it looks. I don't mind the markup at all.

Now, the complexity of the whole system, that's what I have a problem with.

[Osmose]

I've mentioned it before, but Pandoc is a nice workaround; it can convert Markdown (and a few other input languages) into LaTeX. It comes with a shortcut for taking Markdown and generating a PDF out of it via LaTeX.

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

[imok20]

Any chance of a version that works on Snow Leopard being released? Just tried installing – no luck. A shame, I'm about to start typesetting a paper.

[bugs]

Did you try mactex?

http://www.tug.org/mactex/2009/

[amoeba]

Not XeTeX but MacTex-2009 is great on SL. http://www.tug.org/mactex/2009/

[angerman]

maybe I'm missing something, but XeTeX is part of MacTeX, as MacTeX includes TeXLive. (MacTeX 2009, SL)

  $ which xetex
  /usr/local/texlive/2009/bin/universal-darwin/xetex
  $ xetex
  This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.2-0.9995.2 (TeX Live 2009)
  **

[zokier]

So is XeTeX+ConTeXt (ed note: I hate the odd capitalization) the typesetting system to use, or are there even better combos?

[patrickg]

LuaTeX + ConTeXt (also called MKIV), see the page on http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Mark_IV. With this combo, you can use the typesetting power of TeX and the programming power of LuaTeX combined.

[swah]

Misread as XeXeca