Difference between XeTeX and LuaTeX

Posted by Konrad Rudolph on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Konrad Rudolph
Published on 2010-02-24T11:06:34Z Indexed on 2010/05/30 10:44 UTC
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latex

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pdftex

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xetex

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luatex

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microtype

I have a hard time contrasting XeTeX and LuaTeX.

At the moment, I am using XeTeX almost exclusively, mainly because it uses UTF-8 as the native input encoding and because it supports TTF and OTF fonts.

However, the lack of support for pdftex’ microtyping is mildly annoying.

LuaTeX, on the other hand, does support this, as well as UTF-8 input and (rudimentary?) fontspec support.

So my question boils down to: Is there any advantage in using XeTeX over using LuaTeX? Has anybody used both and can compare them? In particular, LuaTeX sounds very experimental and unstable – but is this really the case?

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