On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 11:29 AM, J.A.J. Pater wrote:
I'm was planning to write my master thesis in XeLaTeX until I discovered that ConTeXt can use the XeTeX engine. I need to use a lot of Hebrew - so Right to Left typing - and some linguistic glyphs and stuff.
But from the wiki I understand there are still some issues with ConTeXt's XeTeX-awareness.
Like the bookmarks "may result in some strangeness in certain documents" Can someone tell me what kind of strangeness?
Do not worry about bookmarks. You can probably ask Hans to fix it if it doesn't work properly.
And XeTeX can't use "certain specials and other types of features" Can someone tell me what kind of "specials and types of features"?
I would not bother too much. One of the differences is that XeLaTeX has very good high-level support for changing fonts. That one is missing, but you can still do everything you need. In particular, if you are writing your thesis, those few additional lines that you might need for properly setting the font should not be a problem. XeLaTeX also has some support for OpenType math, but you don't need that.
And now on this list there is a lot of talk about LuaTeX and Mark IV. So I wonder: Is it possible to use MarkIV and XeTeX engine at the same time? And if not, why should (or shouldn't) I use MarkIV over XeTeX?
Minus of Mark IV: it's a bit unstable; problems are fixed quickly, but it's a bit annoying if your thesis doesn't compile one hour or day before the deadline (when you do the final run before you print the document and of course you have no backup of PDF). You can make sure that this doesn't happen by keeping two versions of ConTeXt installed just in case (one that you update and one that you don't). Plus of Mark IV: it has a very powerful programming language in the background. Fun to use (which could just as well be a minus if you become interested in playing with it or in fixing the problems instead of writing your thesis :) :) :) Very well supported. In case that you don't need advanced MKIV features, you can, at least in theory, use the same source to typeset the document with both XeTeX and LuaTeX. For documents that are not too complex this is what I usually do. If I stumble across a problem in one engine, there's still a chance that the other engine will work properly. Mojca