Does anything like a "pdfXeLaTeX" exist?

Question

I have generally been using pdfLaTeX to typeset my documents. I recently heard about XeTeX which supposedly is the same thing, except has better support for things like unicode and fonts.

Is there a tool which operates as XeTeX does but which allows a direct PDF translation, rather than going through intermediate stages?

score 12 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 23 '10 at 18:12

12

XeLaTeX outputs a PDF by default. Yes, it does use xdvipdfmx along the way, but why should that bother you? No DVI file is left behind.

answered Sep 23 '10 at 18:12

frabjous

41,473

1

One problem is that routing the typesetting through xdvipdfmx precludes the use of pdfTeX-like enhancements such as those provided by the microtype package. microtype is currently adding support for LuaTeX. – Sharpie Sep 23 '10 at 18:49
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It's unclear to me that the intermediate level is the problem. Anyway, microtype is also adding (partial) support for XeTeX... See my question here. http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/2986/margin-kerning-in-xelatex-for-texlive-2010-how-to-enable – frabjous Sep 23 '10 at 19:45
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microtype has added LuaTeX support long ago, and a preliminary version that works with XeTeX is available from http://xetex.tk – Philipp Sep 23 '10 at 19:54
I stand corrected. Sorry for the noise. – Sharpie Sep 23 '10 at 20:51
@frabjous: The main difference is the different handling of the graphicx package on the different platforms (in terms of what image formats are supported..) – Billy ONeal Sep 24 '10 at 12:48
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't XeLaTeX support every image format that pdfLaTeX does, and then some? – frabjous Sep 24 '10 at 20:25
@frabjous: No idea. My understanding was that embedding things like PNGs and PDFs (the only two formats I care about) was difficult when going through DVI first. I don't have massive amounts of experience in this area though. – Billy ONeal Sep 25 '10 at 19:37
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What you say is true for the TeX engine, but XeTeX uses an extended DVI format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XeTeX), so I expect them to have added PNG support to that format. – Blaisorblade Sep 30 '10 at 16:36

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:35

3

Yes, and it's called LuaTeX. See also this question on se.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:35

Community

1

answered Sep 23 '10 at 17:56

topskip

37,020

Can you tell Lualatex that a document uses Unicode as its character encoding, without using inputenc? – Charles Stewart Sep 24 '10 at 07:08
Yes, you should not use inputenc (or anything else) if you're using UTF8 encoded input. For fontencoding, use EU2 fontenc or the fontspec package. – topskip Sep 24 '10 at 07:18
That was really not subtle, Patrick ;-) – Arthur Reutenauer Sep 24 '10 at 16:58
@Charles: LuaTeX expects UTF-8 input, full stop. Well, that's not the whole story, as Patrick says, but that's how LuaTeX is supposed to ve used. – Arthur Reutenauer Sep 24 '10 at 17:00

Does anything like a "pdfXeLaTeX" exist?

2 Answers2