On 8/24/06, Pepe Barbe wrote:

After jumping through hoops, with some help I managed to get XeTeX running and using TTF fonts directly with pdfTeX.

But before I go any further I would like to know what is your opinion in using one or the other. When researching a bit on XeTeX I read there were several caveates vs. using pdfTeX with LaTeX.

Is this the same? In ConTeXt. What can I expect to work and what not? If TTF can be used with pdfTeX (with some effort) what is the advantage of using XeTeX with ConTeXt?

In contrast to LaTeX where many packages are specifically written for pdfTeX and for pdfTeX only (or dvips and dvips only) and not maintained any more, so you can't use them at all (unless/until someone writes a new XeTeX-specific package, but it's still very unlikely that one could use PSTricks in the near future for example). ConTeXt should be much more transparent to the user in the sense that in most cases you don't really have to care whether you compile a document with pdfTeX or XeTeX (you don't or at least shouldn't need to change your documents at all apart from some font definitions). For me the major drawback until today was that I wasn't able to include figure (now I can do that). Apart from that the only thing that comes to my mind is the usage of (math) fonts in general. XeTeX has not been around for such a long time as pdfTeX, so if you want to set up your own font for math or whatever, you might need slightly more patience. (Latin Modern hasn't been set up yet to work in the same was as it does in pdfTeX for example.) And if you want to use the old TeX fonts, you might come accross some problems with accented letters (XeTeX doesn't know that a certain font is ec-encoded) ... etc. But well ... if you managed to get your favorite fonts working in pdfTeX and if you don't need Vietnamese, Arabic or other exotic letters, scripts or fonts, you don't really need XeTeX. pdfTeX will be considerably imroved pretty soon as well. To conclude it in two sentences: concentrate on content instead. You would have to think twice if you would have to decide between LaTeX and ConTeXt. The difference between documents in pdfTeX and XeTeX is only a matter of a couple of lines in setup, "nothing more". Mojca

Pepe Barbe wrote:

After jumping through hoops, with some help I managed to get XeTeX running and using TTF fonts directly with pdfTeX.

But before I go any further I would like to know what is your opinion in using one or the other. When researching a bit on XeTeX I read there were several caveates vs. using pdfTeX with LaTeX.

Is this the same? In ConTeXt. What can I expect to work and what not? If TTF can be used with pdfTeX (with some effort) what is the advantage of using XeTeX with ConTeXt?

by the end of the year / begin next year, pdftex will support open type natively xetex uses libraries and hooks into platform font support; pdftex will stay independent of libraries and focus on extendibility and configurability (think of scripts that demand complex solutions and different ones as well, like arab); of course the question is if in the end it makes much difference for the average user concerning context and these two ... we may end up with a common core and different subsystems and levels of support; graphics for instance can be dealt with in a way hidden from the user, as can input encodings; fonts and font features may differ but i'll try to offer a kind of generic interface to for instance open type features since the definition and control of fonts will differ per engine of course it also depends on what i use (most) and what users demand -) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------