What are the differences between XeLaTeX and pdflatex?

What are the differences between XeLaTeX and pdflatex?

Both commands ( pdflatex and xelatex) generate a PDF. What is the technical/effective/historical/etc. difference between these two commands? I’m using TeX Live. PdfTeX and XeTeX and the equivalent commands for latex are two implementations for the same purpose, as you have pointed out already.

What’s the difference between pdfTeX and XeTeX?

PdfTeX and XeTeX and the equivalent commands for latex are two implementations for the same purpose, as you have pointed out already. The Wikipedia articles have more details on the history and development.

Can you use overleaf with TeX Live 2018?

Using TeX Live 2018 the result is quite different. On Overleaf the compilation will “succeed” but pdfLaTeX loudly complains about problems that you should fix to get the characters correctly rendered into the output PDF. Result from compilation using pdfLaTeX on TeX Live 2018:

When did TeX Live switch to UTF-8?

The release of TeX Live 2018 coincided with an important change to LaTeX: switching to UTF-8 as LaTeX’s default input encoding.

Which is better LuaLaTeX or XeTeX handout?

To give LuaLaTeX a try, I recompiled an old short handout of mine in LuaLaTex, and they mostly looked exactly the same. Where they differed, however, XeLaTeX clearly gave the better results. Below are some examples I found in my handout:

Which is better Xe La Tex or Lua La Tex?

In my personal opinion (i.e. from anecdotal situations I’ve encountered), lua (la)tex looks indeed a little less stable than xe (la)tex, in particular when it comes to some advanced font features ( fontspec was after all developed for xe (la)tex first).

Which is the best compiler to use for latex?

You can usually go with pdfLaTeX, but choosing a compiler depends on each project’s needs. LaTeX supports only .eps and .ps image formats for use with \\includegraphics. pdfLaTeX supports .png, .jpg, .pdf image formats. XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX both supports UTF-8 robustly out of the box, as well as Truetype and OpenType.

What’s the difference between latex, pdfLaTeX and fancyhdr?

Graphic: Roughly, LaTeX knows nothing besides EPS (though most things can be wrapped into EPS via fig/xfig/winfig), pdflatex does all sorts of graphic (though not .eps) pdfLaTeX does not work nice with fancyhdr, among others. With graphic, you will prefer pdfLaTeX, without graphics, latex is more likely to deal with “everything else”.

Do you need pdfLaTeX to use TeX4ht?

Tex4ht needs dvi files generated from latex, it does not need pdflatex. Without Latex, tex4ht will not work.

How to run XeLaTeX Job commands in latexmk?

$ latexmk -commands xelatex job Commands used by latexmk: To run latex, I use “latex %O %S” To run pdflatex, I use “pdflatex %O %S” There doesn’t appear bo be any logical mechanism for selecting a tex program from the command line, and it’s not clear from the source how one would do this, either.

What’s the difference between XeTeX and latex fonts?

One of the main differences from an operational point of view is that XeTeX has better support for fonts — in particular you can use system fonts instead of only TeX fonts. It also has better support for non-latin character encodings. Not the answer you’re looking for?

Are there any packages that only work in LuaLaTeX?

LuaLaTeX also has a built in scripting language (Lua) which is being used more and more to do advanced things. One of my favorites is the package `selnolig` which selectively disables ligatures when they cross morpheme boundaries. It’s done in LuaTeX and only works in LuaLaTeX. And there are more examples of packages that only work in LuaTeX.

What’s the difference between pdfLaTeX and inputenc?

Apart from the packages you mentioned, the only difference that I have is that I don’t load the inputenc package and don’t set a font encoding. Furthermore, you should remove any explicit driver names if you have given them in options to packages (e.g. hyperref or xcolor ).

What’s the difference between MiKTeX 2.9 and pdflatex?

With MiKTeX 2.9 one has to manually install the XITS fonts using the MiKTeX package manager. Apart from the packages you mentioned, the only difference that I have is that I don’t load the inputenc package and don’t set a font encoding.

Which is the latest version of Texmaker for XeLaTeX?

Download Latest version of Texmaker: 4.1.1 dated Jan 3 2014 that has xelatex support in standard commands like shown below. Hence there might be no need of Configuring Texmaker for xelatex with `User Commands. You will have to define a custom command in Texmaker – it’s fairly simple.

How to switch from pdfLaTeX to LuaLaTeX?

If you want to permanently switch from pdflatex to lualatex, see Joseph’s answer. If, however, you want to be able to use both, you need to add a user-defined command. From the menu, User -> User commands -> Edit user commands opens a dialog box.

How to configure Texmaker to use LuaTeX?

This command is now available form the menu or as Alt+Shift+F1. Normally, lualatex should be in your command search path (given by the PATHenvironment variable), but if it isn’t, you need to specify the full path to lualatex. Check the path for pdflatex in the preferences: lualatex is most probably in the same directory.