Drawbacks of XeTeX/LuaTeX

Question

Currently I use pdflatex to process my documents, but I want to be with the cool kids and switch to XeTeX or LuaTeX. My documents are moderately multilingual (main text in portuguese or english, quotations and references in english, german, french, russian and greek), but nothing that pdflatex can't handle with some effort. I just want to get rid of the cruft and be able to use OpenType fonts.

So, is there any drawback of XeTeX/LuaTeX that should stop me from switching right now?

My main concern is math typesetting, as there's usually more math than text in my documents =)

The only issue I am aware is that their support for microtype is incomplete.

Answer 1

Math isn't the problem if you are happy with the "normal" math fonts used already by pdftex. This will work fine with xelatex + lualatex too. You can also try unicode-math but I don't know if it works in all cases.

The multilanguage support is more problematic: As you are using different scripts (greek, russian) you can't use babel (at least for this languages), as it will break the unicode font support. So you need polyglossia and this doesn't work with lualatex yet as it use (at least for some languages) xetex specific commands like \XeTeXinterclass. Also the support files of some of the languages (e.g. french) are much more sophisticated in the babel version. It is possible to mix babel + polyglossia but it depends a lot on the actual language combination if and how good it works.

Regarding the microtype support: The newest version of xetex can do protrusion (I haven't tried it yet), lualatex can protrusion + expansion. The author of microtype has just announced on c.t.t. that a preliminary version of microtype exists which supports both engines.
But at least for lualatex it isn't needed, one can activate both without problems manually:

 \documentclass[fontsize=12pt]{scrartcl}
  \pdfprotrudechars1
  \pdfadjustspacing1

 \usepackage{lipsum}
 \usepackage{fontspec}
 \newfontfeature{Microtype}{protrusion=default;expansion=default;}
 \setmainfont[Microtype,Ligatures=TeX]{Linux Libertine O}
 \begin{document}
 \lipsum
 \end{document}

Answer 2

If you are a scientist, there is a pretty serious drawback: there's no support for XeTeX/LuaTeX in arXiv, nor in any of the journals I looked.

Of course, that's not a technical drawback, but is the reason why I haven't switched to the new engines for the majority of my documents.

Answer 3

Depends on your needs:

• Micro-typography for OTF fonts isn't really stable yet
• Support for micro-typography and OpenType math seems to be much better in ConTeXt than in LaTeX, so you might consider switching to ConTeXt
• If you don't need micro-typography or OpenType math and want to continue with LaTeX, both XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX are fine
• Normally you want matching text and math fonts. There are very few such combinations: Latin Modern, Cambria, Asana, XITS, mathptmx, mathpazo, mathdesign. Personally I like Latin Modern and Cambria most. Cambria is the only "professional" font in this list, and would be my first choice if OTF math support were stable enough. For the moment, I keep using Latin Modern with pdftex.

PdfTeX + microtype + Latin Modern has the advantage of being absolutely stable and giving coherent output. I'd say you should try both ways and then decide whether the advantages of OTF/Unicode outweigh the remaining issues.

Answer 4

I have been extensively using LuaTeX (with ConTeXt) for about three years now, and like you my documents are mostly math. Although I use ConTeXt, I assume that most of this will also be true for LaTeX.

LuaTeX is a superset of pdfTeX, so everything that works in pdfTeX also works in LuaTeX. The only real issue is that the engine and the associated macros are still evolving, and on rare occasions bugs creep into the latest version. I normally keep a backup of two previous versions of the engine and the macro package, and have rollback back on two or three occasions (usually when close to a deadline, when I have no time to see why something fails). Rolling back is relatively simple if your package manager or TeX installation supports it. Most Linux distributions allow you to rollback and I believe that the latest TeX Live also supports rollback of packages. Other than that, I have not faced any issues with luatex. I do not use XeTeX, so cannot comment on that.

Answer 5

In addition to the other answers, there is also a minor problem with XeTeX: cropping is not available for included graphics.

Answer 6

I tried switching to XeTeX as my standard compilation path recently, and ran into issues with non-english characters in unicode source files: while pdfTeX will happily produce the ö glyph when faced with the word Gröbner and with \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} in the preamble, XeTeX simply left out the glyph, forcing me to switch back to pdfTeX or use \"o instead.

There may well be an easy fix for this behaviour, but I didn't find it, and didn't particularly (at that time) need the benefits of using XeTeX.

Edited to add: araujoms pointed out in comments to this answer that all my issues with XeTeX are solved completely by the inclusion of \usepackage{fontspec}.

Answer 7

XeTeX still has troubles with importing movies. See Why \movieref does not work under XeLaTeX. This was my main motivation for moving to LuaTeX not XeTeX from PDFLaTeX. Unfortunately, LuaLaTeX is visibly slower that XeLaTeX, at least for my very specific document.

Answer 8

As it turned out in An equivalent of psfrag and polyglossia together?, you cannot use psfrag with XeLaTeX. For me it was a serious problem.

Answer 9

XeTeX runs 3 times slower than latex-dvips-ps2pdf as explained in Why does xelatex execute much much slower than latex-dvips-ps2pdf?