[XeTeX] From LaTeX to XeLaTeX

[Will Robertson]

On 30/01/2008, at 7:23 AM, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:

> I'm afraid this is an FAQ, but I didn't manage to find the answers  
> on the
> internet or in some doc.

There's no document, but there should be :)
Volunteers welcome…

> I'm currently a LaTeX user, and I want to try XeTeX (from TeXlive  
> 2007, on
> linux platform) in order to use OpenType fonts and get native  
> support for
> utf-8.

Since you're on Linux, you'll be using (implicitly) the xdvipdfmx  
driver, which is based on dvipdfm. Bear this in mind for any driver- 
based functionality (such as supported image formats or whatever).

> I have a few questions, falling in the two following categories:
>
> 1. What changes do I need to do in my curent documents in order to
> have them compile with XeLaTeX?
>
> - From what I understand now, I have (of course) to remove fontenc and
> inputenc packages. I also need to use fontspec and xunicode  
> packages. The
> xltxtra package seems to be recommended (and coud be used alone,  
> since it
> loads fontspec en xunicode too).

Indeed :)

> - The default encoding is now UTF-16 or UTF-8: I should use
> \XeTeXdefaultencoding or XeTeXinputencoding for sources in an other  
> encoding
> (but I dont think I want to do that, I like utf-8).

Yeah, it's highly recommended to start with utf8 at least with new  
documents.

> - Lmodern becomes the default font (it was my default font allready,  
> sort of).
> So I need no longer use the lmodern package. I guess other font- 
> relevant
> packages (such as mathptmx) become irrelevant too, but I'm not sure:  
> how about
> the math fonts?

You can still use all these package, but load them before fontspec. It  
doesn't do much with maths so you'll probably want to load eulervm or  
some other maths package if the font you choose doesn't blend well  
with the default maths fonts.

> 2. Is there any compatibility issues with major packages?
>
> - For example, anything closely related to pdfTeX features, like the  
> microtype
> package, should not work... Due to the compilation mode, I think  
> anything
> relying on PostScript (such as PSTricks) should fail too.

There is experimental support for PSTricks somewhere, but in general  
you're right. Some packages like pdfpages have required some  
alterations to work in XeTeX (iirc) but the only way of knowing is to  
try. Most things do work.

> - How about hyperref and babel?

Hyperref is fine if you load it with the right driver; babel works so  
some extent -- I haven't done much testing but fontspec tries to do  
the right thing for the languages that try to change the font encoding.

Hope this helps. Let us know how you go :) If you'd like to write a  
short paper based on your experiences, we can easily get it published  
in The PracTeX Journal and/or TUGboat.

Good luck,
Will
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