[Tex/LaTex] Drawbacks of XeTeX/LuaTeX

luatexxetex

Currently I use pdflatex to process my documents, but I want to be with the cool kids and switch to XeTeX or LuaTeX. My documents are moderately multilingual (main text in portuguese or english, quotations and references in english, german, french, russian and greek), but nothing that pdflatex can't handle with some effort. I just want to get rid of the cruft and be able to use OpenType fonts.

So, is there any drawback of XeTeX/LuaTeX that should stop me from switching right now?

My main concern is math typesetting, as there's usually more math than text in my documents =)

The only issue I am aware is that their support for microtype is incomplete.

Best Answer

Math isn't the problem if you are happy with the "normal" math fonts used already by pdftex. This will work fine with xelatex + lualatex too. You can also try unicode-math but I don't know if it works in all cases.

The multilanguage support is more problematic: As you are using different scripts (greek, russian) you can't use babel (at least for this languages), as it will break the unicode font support. So you need polyglossia and this doesn't work with lualatex yet as it use (at least for some languages) xetex specific commands like \XeTeXinterclass. Also the support files of some of the languages (e.g. french) are much more sophisticated in the babel version. It is possible to mix babel + polyglossia but it depends a lot on the actual language combination if and how good it works.

Regarding the microtype support: The newest version of xetex can do protrusion (I haven't tried it yet), lualatex can protrusion + expansion. The author of microtype has just announced on c.t.t. that a preliminary version of microtype exists which supports both engines.
But at least for lualatex it isn't needed, one can activate both without problems manually:

 \documentclass[fontsize=12pt]{scrartcl}
  \pdfprotrudechars1
  \pdfadjustspacing1

 \usepackage{lipsum}
 \usepackage{fontspec}
 \newfontfeature{Microtype}{protrusion=default;expansion=default;}
 \setmainfont[Microtype,Ligatures=TeX]{Linux Libertine O}
 \begin{document}
 \lipsum
 \end{document}
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