1

I use Mac OSX 10.13 with MacTex. For editing I use VSCode and the extension LaTeX-workshop.

I have been told that with XeLaTex you can use more fonts. But I can't find the docs of this package/distribution/library/whatever_it_is.

If I install XeLaTeX, will I need MacTex? Will I be able to use my current LaTeX templates? Is XeLaTeX the same as XeTeX?

Thanks in advance!

Henri Menke
  • 109,596

2 Answers2

2

If you have xetex, you've got xelatex. If your document is in plain TeX (a bunch of macros used by Knuth), you will have to do xetex document.tex instead of tex document.tex to compile with this engine.

If you are using LaTeX macros, then xelatex document.tex instead of latex document.tex will do the job. Try to xelatex this MWE

\usepackage{article}
\begin{document}
Dzień dobry Mysłowice !
\end{document}

XeTeX is normally shipped with your distributions, and you can easilly install it, searching xetex. The same goes for doc, for example in texlives texdoc xetex.

Look at this post: I am new to TeX. Should I use LaTeX, XeLaTeX, …? for more (might be a duplicate of your question).

sztruks
  • 3,074
1

Please note that MacTeX is a TeX distribution, in this case an adaptation of TeX Live for Mac OS X. As such, its contains TeX engines such as TeX, PDFTeX, LuaTeX… and XeTeX, and their respective LaTeX formats (to make it simple, a format is a set of macros built upon the TeX language) : PDFLaTeX, XeLaTeX, LuaLaTeX and so on.

So if you install MacTeX on your machine (supposedly a Mac), XeTeX and XeLaTeX will be installed at the same time.

Franck Pastor
  • 18,756