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I know there are a lot of compilers for LaTeX, but I actually have never bothered changing it and now I'm used to pdflatex.

But how are the others compilers different from it? Do they require different syntax or packages?

It's not even fully clear to me what compilers actually are and what practically and technically means to use one compiler instead of another.

Emanuele Giordano
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  • It looks like the suggested asnwer explains the differences and the evolution of the engines, but it's still not clear to me what compilers actually are. Differences will be easier to understand then. – Emanuele Giordano Jun 04 '21 at 16:51
  • Well, like all compilers (though we usually talk about engines) TeX is a program which takes a text file (which should be written with a certain syntax) and gives you something else (a .dvi or .pdf file). Then we are quite sloppy and do not really discriminate between the program and the syntax (the language) in which the text file should be written. In this sense it's not much different from g++ taking a text file and spitting an executable. – campa Jun 04 '21 at 16:56
  • I'm assuming you mean the difference between the three major engines (compilers): pdfTeX, XeTeX, and LuaTeX. XeTeX differs from pdfTeX mainly regarding fonts and Unicode/multilingual support: it can access system fonts easily, write bidirectional text, and scripts that require “advanced” shaping (e.g. arabic). LuaTeX's main selling point is that you can write Lua code in your document, allowing things that are not possible in other engines (also most of the multilingual support available in XeTeX). Usually you only need to change a few packages (mainly font-related ones) to switch engines. – Phelype Oleinik Jun 04 '21 at 17:42

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