Vimtex and Xelatex

Question

I tried for hours to use vimtex to compile a document that requires XeLaTeX. As the vimtex documentation says, the first line of my TeX document is %! TEX program = xelatex. However, I always get the following error:

/usr/local/texlive/2015/texmf-dist/tex/latex/fontspec/fontspec.sty|43 error| Fatal fontspec error: "cannot-use-pdftex"

So it look like PdfLaTeX is still used. Note that building a document that only requires PdfLaTeX work perfectly, and that the document I try to build with XeLaTeX is just a "Hello world" using a class that needs XeLaTeX and that compiles with xelatex file.txt command in a terminal.

Answer 1

If you are using latexmk to compile and you use XeLaTeX for the most of the time, I suggest change the defaut engine for your latexmk, just add one line to you $HOME/.latexmkrc

$pdflatex="xelatex %O %S";

Or you might want to keep pdflatex as your latexmk option. I suggest changing the choice of vimtex: add these lines to your $HOME/.vimrc

let g:vimtex_compiler_latexmk = { 
        \ 'executable' : 'latexmk',
        \ 'options' : [ 
        \   '-xelatex',
        \   '-file-line-error',
        \   '-synctex=1',
        \   '-interaction=nonstopmode',
        \ ],
        \}

options here stands for the options of latexmk when you use \ll to compile in vim.

You can refer to the Official Document to see more customizations for latexmk.

Answer 2

The exclamation point is in the wrong place. It should be this: % !TEX program = xelatex with the exclamation point right before the TEX. Then write the file, reload vimtex with <leader>lx, and recompile and see if that works.