[XeTeX] xelatex vs. pdflatex + otfinst

[Christoph Bier]

Sebastian Hanigk schrieb am 02.11.2006 23:41:

> Hello!
> 
> As I am now in the process of writing my thesis, the typesetting  
> issue looms at the horizon (so to speak).
> 
> For more than a year I was using xelatex for most of my work but as  
> an alternative there is the possibility of using pdflatex and otfinst  
> for the generation of TeX-usable fonts from my OTF fonts.
> 
> The (approximate) conditions for this work will be the usage of  
> Adobe's Minion Pro as text font with Myriad Pro as companion for  
> captions and some inserts. Mathematical typesetting will be  
> important, as well as graphics, especially MetaPost.
> 
> The simplicity of the fontspec package compels me using xelatex, but  
> at least for Minion Pro there exists a usable package which I will  
> test in the next weeks.
> 
> Now the question: what do you suggest? The pros of xelatex are the  
> simple usage of OTF fonts and their features and Unicode support (OK,  
> inputenc exists); on the other hand, pdflatex can use the microtype  
> package (but do I need it?) and sometimes I get the impression that  
> mathematical typesetting with xelatex isn't as good as with the  
> normal TeX tools; furthermore I need to integrate my TeX engine with  
> MetaPost.

I really like XeTeX's easy font usage (unicode doesn't affect me).
But I can't pass on pdfTeX's microtypographic extensions. Character
protrusion just looks very good and font expansion saves so much
time (without \sloppy paragraphes ;-))---at least typesetting
documents in german language---that I just can't afford not to use
it. If you plan to type set your thesis with MinionPro you can use
the brilliant MinionPro package. But AFAIK there's no package for
MyriadPro even if you can use the scripts of MinionPro to produce
the corresponding files. I don't know the results of otfinst---I
installed MyriadPro with fontinst (after converting otf to pfb) and
it worked fairly well for headlines, tabulars and captions.

HTH

Best,
  Christoph
-- 
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