Abandon LaTeX2e for LaTeX3 or LuaTeX

Question

I think my question is: Should I abandon pdflatex, possibly for xetex or context, and a TeX/LaTeX based macro writing approach, possibly for a LuaTeX or LaTeX3 based approach?

Possibly relevant to the answer is that I am an academic who exclusively uses the English language and a lot of math. I have been using TeX on and off for a number of years. I am happy using TeX to create all my documents (papers, presentations, letters, etc.), new macros and even simple packages (although the whole literate programming and documentation thing is beyond me). My macros tend to use both TeX and LaTeX macros. I used to create DVI files by compiling with latex but now I use pdflatex to create pdf files. The change from EPS to PDF figures and the loss of pstricks took some time for me to get used to, but I am now happy with the change. Recently, I gave up BibTeX for Biber and BibLaTeX and am very happy. I am willing to put in the time to learn LuaTeX/LaTeX3/ConTeX if there are advantages.

Answer 1

I'm going to expand on my comment and turn it into an answer.

I take issue with the word abandon in your question. Using xelatex and latex3 does not mean that you have to abandon pdflatex and latex2e. It is entirely possible to use them alongside each other. The differences at the document level are such that it is relatively straightforward to remember "This is a pdflatex document" and "This is a xelatex document". I do my lectures with xelatex because I want to be able to use unicode-math. I tend to write my articles with pdflatex - see below - though for the fun of it I tried an article with xelatex and using unicode symbols and really quite liked the readability of the source code.

So when there's functionality that I would like to make use of, then I'm happy to use xelatex or lualatex or latex3. If I don't need them, then at the moment I'll probably not use them so that I keep my options open. As I see more "here's what you can do" on this site, then I find myself more and more using them to make use of what I learn here. Some is a bit silly (such as my use of unicode-math) but others are more serious.

The one thing that I really don't take any notice of is the compatibility with journals or the arxiv. This is for two reasons:

1. If a journal actually accepts my article then (within reason) I'm happy to modify it to suit their bizarre style requirements (and before you ask, all journals have bizarre requirements).

2. Before a journal accepts my article then I'll not know what bizarre requirements I'm going to have to meet so I'd rather make my life easier here and now than try to guess what I might have to do when it is accepted.

The point of that second one is that I spend a lot of time writing an article. I'm often doing the maths as I actually write it because it is often only when I see it written down that I see whether or not my argument worked - when it's in my head then I gloss over all the technicalities. So it's not "prove result then write article" it is "prove result while writing article". This means that the writing stage is longer and more involved than if I worked the other way and so it is all the more important that the writing be easy and not get in the way. So being able to make use of great tools and stuff is more important than not annoying some future copy-editor.

So if you see an example of something on this site and you think "That would be just perfect for what I'm trying to do", don't let the fact that it uses xelatex or lualatex or latex3 put you off. Just think of it as another LaTeX package that you use for some of your documents, but not all of them. It's no big deal.

Answer 2

If you want to publish in academic journals, you need to be sensitive to what new TeX related goodies their setup can handle. For instance, I've had to regress from BibLaTeX to BibTeX because a journal couldn't handle it. Likewise, I'd expect that LuaTeX or ConTeXt might not fit well into the workflow of a journal. I'm sure there are people here who know more about this sort of thing, and it probably depends on your field. (There are journals in my area that accept submissions in Word only! Sigh)

There's also the worry that collaborators will have older TeX distributions, and so you may encounter friction when trying to work with others. My university's computers seem to still have an old distribution which doesn't include many packages I would otherwise use. (This doesn't affect me since I use my laptop, but when I'm working with others, I need to go down to their level).

In short, feel free to move towards the new stuff for your own documents, but be aware that journals and collaborators might be less keen on staying cutting edge.

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I think it is perhaps worth making a comment or two in response to the discussion in comments on this and Yiannis' answers. There are good reasons for journals and big university-wide computing set ups to avoid the cutting edge technologies that we are fond of on this site. As Barbara Beeton mentioned, stability is key. LaTeX2e is stable. The bugs have been ironed out, and packages like fixltx2e fix a few remaining oddities. Moving to a system involving components under active development (e.g. LuaTeX, BibLaTeX…) would mean frequent breakages and things like that; things that publishers can't afford to deal with.

Answer 3

Although these issues were discussed earlier here are some pointers, from someone that has been using TeX/LaTeX since the middle 80s.

1. The knowledge you build with TeX/LaTeX and friends is additive. What you have used as plain TeX commands, your \defs and similar can be used today with all of the above variants. Similarly for all the LaTeX commands and yes your pstricks knowledge can still be used with pdfLaTeX.
2. The new variants such as XeLaTeX offer advantages in some areas especially font management. If you are using special fonts and UTF8 typing it will pay you to migrate. In many cases it is as simple as adding a few lines on top of your normal LaTeX/pdfLaTeX file.
3. LuaLaTeX is not as yet production stable and personally cannot see any reason to use it on a daily basis unless you need fancy calculations, iteration and other complicated macros.
4. LaTeX3. Portions of it are stable and can be used to-day in peaceful coexistence with LaTeX2e commands. You cannot as of to-day say I will only use LaTeX3 as it is still incomplete (it has no kernel as yet - that compares to LaTeX2e or offer any of the standard classes in the new syntax).
5. ConTeXt is a great system but for whatever reason is not as popular as the other variants. Personally I don't use it as I still get lots of installation problems on Window machines.

My general advice (especially for maths) is to stay with pdfLaTeX or XeLaTeX and you good for the next 10 years (I cannot see amsmath migrating to LaTeX3 any time soon). It is harmless though to keep your ears on the ground and try some of the new things. For example xparse from the LaTeX3 suite has a lot to offer as well as all the sequence macros, as they can save you a lot of programming time.

I personally use pdfLaTeX for my daily engineering documents and for its intellectual stimulation since the late Martin Gardner's column in Scientific America stopped being published!

Answer 4

I believe that the killer features for LuaTeX will come. The first one (shared with XeTeX) is surely fontspec which lets you easily select any system font you have. There are a few rough edges (for example how to find the font name) though. More and more fonts will be OpenType fonts and the more OpenType fonts we have, the greater the need for XeTeX and LuaTeX is.

Other small things will be that depend on postprocessing your input, for example https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/28128/243 which prevents one letter words on the end of lines (useful for the polish language for example).

This should be a smooth transition. Many times you can just take your PDFTeX based source and run through LuaTeX and you will have almost the same output. There are a few differences between LuaTeX and PDFTeX, so don't expect identical results.

Other than that, I don't see a reason to switch to ConTeXt, unless you have documents where you have difficulties typesetting them. ConTeXt is really great with some documents, but there is never a need to switch (same for the opposite direction ConTeXt -> LaTeX) if "every thing is just fine".

And with LaTeX3: it is mostly behind the scenes. The LaTeX 3 team does great work providing interfaces that package developers can use, so you can expect better packages in due time. But these will probably have the same easy to use commands as before.