Do you use XeTeX or pdfTeX?

Question

As far as I understand it (a few days of research here and there), there are two major TeX engines: pdfTeX and XeTeX. pdfTeX is the "standard", having been around since the early 1990s, renders straight to PDF, and improves on some minor formatting issues with original TeX.

XeTeX, on the other hand, also outputs PDF, can use any system font without complication, and can accept Unicode input by default. And yet for some reason it's not the default engine in any of the TeX distributions.

Do I have this right? Why is pdfTeX still the standard? Which do you use?

Answer 1

I use whatever texlive releases and Debian / Ubuntu package for my respective systems :) It seems there is a texlive-xetex package but I haven't used that yet.

More seriously, (La)TeX is now a standard and these things do not change overnight. And I am quite frankly quite happy with pdftex --- in no small measure because it can render latex files I have written over two decades (modulo the latex2e change of yore).

Answer 2

MacOs User -- I enable XeTex in TeXShop -- it's in the preferences. Sometimes I use XeLaTeX.

Answer 3

Reasons to prefer pdftex over xetex: if you use context, pdftex's support is quite abit more advanced; not surprisingly, since context grew alongside pdftex. xetex supports context level mkii, but the current context language variaety is mkiv, which makes use of the luatex primitives.

Cf. context on xetex and contextgarden

Answer 4

Xetex has many plusses when it gets to advanced font techniques on the ligature and character level (as well as a simple interface to use otf fonts) but on the other hand it has drawbacks when it gets to micro-typography on the page level. That is, in Pdftex (or Pdflatex), it is possible to use the microtype package which gives you a nicer margin and some other features concerning letter kerning and spacing.

Generally, most users of Tex/Latex won’t care much about these features anyway (and well, you can see that in the documents they produce); therefore I think neither side seems to have significantly more momentum; and therefore the standard settings are likely to stay the way they are. (Until in an undefined number of years someone is able to and actually does merge these features…)