On Jan 21, 2007, at 11:59 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
In summer I almost lost my nerves when I had to make a presentation with Lithuanian, Turkish, Romanian, ... Vietnamese names (and had only one night to make it ready). One letter was missing in Unicode vectors for pdfTeX, [st]cedilla/commaaccent was problematic anyway (iwona and lm use different letters on the same slot), for Vietnamese I needed to redefine the font (\ifcountryisvietnamthen ... and font switching macros seemed to have little bugs, so some specific combinations of commands failed for basically no reason). It was a headache. (I needed external figures and I didn't know that using them was possible in XeTeX.)
OK, I see where XeTeX has its strong points. And I can certainly agree: if you want unusual glyphs that are not part of a more-or-less standard encoding, that can be a PITA.
Two other reasons why I'm sometimes using XeTeX is the ability to use any font and the ability to use any glyph without too much troubles (all that might be possible in pdfTeX, but even now that I potentially know how to do that, I stil find it too cumbersome - too much work just for the sake of being able to use a single font for a title somewhere on a poster - too much overhelm).
Well ... another reason might be "just because it's fun to play a bit" ;)
You can do a lot more than that (typeset the most obscure scripts in the world), but if you don't ask for it, you probably don't need it either.
Yes, I was just wondering how much time I should spend on ``playing a bit.''
Well ... I didn't manage to get over this (buggy windows tools - neither lcdftypetools nor texfont worked properly) and aferwards I didn't want to take time for it (I know that it's history, not the future, so it makes no sense to loose time with it). But if you don't have problems like the one described above, if you don't need "fancy apple fonts" and if the desired fonts work OK for you, there's probably no reason to switch.
And when talking about "should I switch to XeTeX": The nice thing about ConTeXt is that you usually shouldn't notice the difference at any point of the document except for possibly sligthly different line with font definitions.
I assume that once the integration of opentype in luatex is finished, this will be even more straightforward, giving us access to many opentype features. I'm just wondering if it makes sense to spend more time here
It depends on what you consider "spend more time". If I'm not counting the time reading the XeTeX mailing list, writing feature requests or doing minor fixes in code or on the wiki from time to time, there's basically no additional time involved. It simply works out of the box.
Well, that depends on your needs: the only ``exotic'' script that I use on a regular basis is polytonic Greek, and this works indeed out of the box (very impressive), but in my quick tests, failed to work as soon as I added the mapping=tex-text command to the font. But your post has been immensely helpful, Mojca. Thanks for your time, I really see where XeTeX is useful, but I also see that it probably won't do a lot for me. Best Thomas