

New TeX engines compared: LuaTeX, ConTeXt and XeTeX - idle
http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/36/213

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imurray
The two biggest differences I noticed when I tried XeTeX was 1) the pdf files
were _much_ smaller than from pdflatex, and 2) I couldn't use microtype [1]
with XeTeX.

I stuck with pdflatex to use microtype (which is awesome), and use pdfsizeopt
[2] to crush the size of my pdfs.

(More details: LuaTeX also makes small pdfs and might be the way to go, but I
haven't tried it much. The size advantage over pdflatex depends on the fonts
in use. There is apparently microtype support for XeTeX in the works.)

[1] ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-
archive/macros/latex/contrib/microtype/microtype.pdf

[2] <http://code.google.com/p/pdfsizeopt/> and my notes on it:
[http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/compnotes/latex.html#...](http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/compnotes/latex.html#pdfsquish)

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chalst
False presupposition in the title: Context is not a Tex engine, it is a
format, either for Pdftex (Context Mk2) or Luatex (either Context Mk4 or Mk2).

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shadowfox
In the link the top rated comment makes the same observation.

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mark_l_watson
I have used LaTex to write a few books. I usually use TexShop for OS X which
uses XeTex so you get the unicode support, etc. Again, for the Mac, the
Aquamacs version of Emacs has goot LaTex support built in, and is a good
alternative to TexShop.

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cal2
Your comment sounds like TeXShop only uses XeTeX, which is not true. TeXShop
certainly has the option to use XeTeX, along with plain TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt,
and other variants. :-)

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szany
If anyone still needs convincing that these are superior to, say, Word:
<http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex>

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jff
<http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html> KerTeX is nice and small.

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hsmyers
Not what I'd call 'New'---these have been around for a while and depending on
you needs do quite well. I prefer XeTeX because as one of the answers said,
'fonts just work'.

