I am using LaTeX for years now but I am considering to migrate to XeLaTeX.
The main reason for this change is the babel
package which change a lot the layout of my documents according to my language (French). For example, the itemize environment in LaTeX/Babel (in French) is completely different from the original (LaTeX/Babel/English). I prefer the original layout and I don't like the changes made by babel authors of the French option1. XeLaTeX (with Polyglossia and French language selected) does not change the layout (AFAIK).
For example, here are two screenshots. At the left, there is the LaTeX/Babel/French way of itemize. At the right, there is the same text with XeLaTeX/polyglossia/French. For me, there are no doubts the second (right side) is better.
However, I have several questions about XeLaTeX. I don't know it at all, so please excuse the naivety.
- Is the default font in XeLaTeX the same than the one in LaTeX? In my screenshot the XeLaTeX font seems a little bit thicker.
-> Related question : is it still usefull to call
lmodern
package with XeLaTeX? - Is the
csquotes
package still working with XeLaTeX? - For writing with XeLaTeX, I add these three packages calls after the document class :
fontspec
,xunicode
,polyglossia
(with the command\setmainlanguage{french}
). Is it sufficient? Do I miss something? - With the three package mentioned in question 3, do I have correct ligature and hyphenation for French?
I am also interested by documentations explaining how to migrate from LaTeX to XeLaTeX.
1. I believe it is not the job of the language package to decide the layout of the document.
french
option tobabel
actually does change the document layout, as you observe; but these changes can be undone.babel
does but I believe it is not always simple. It seems to me it is easier to migrate to XeLaTeX (which is, anyway, more closely interconnected withpolyglossia
, the future ofbabel
)...\frenchbsetup{StandardLayout=true}
that difficult?;-)
csquotes
a ton and have been using XeTeX for nearly six months now—I've never had an issue.