[Tugindia] Help on XeTeX

[Nina Mazumdar]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 3:16 PM, Ramji Srimurugan
<srimurugan.imagine at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Tugindia members,
>
> I have a requirement to create documents with multi-lingual text (say,..
> English, Tamil & Devanagari). Seems like XeTeX which accepts Unicode input

Indeed, you made the right decision.

> is quite suitable for the process. I am however completely new to this
> development and have a number of queries related to the same..
>
> 1. Can we use LaTeX tags/literals within XeTeX ?? (Do the packages meant for
> use with LaTeX work with XeTeX too ?)

Of course,  you can use almost all the packages with XeTeX. Most of
the packages (like hyperref) already have backend drivers for XeTeX.
Hence, you should not find any problems in this respect.

> 2. How to edit Unicode documents ?? (came across one editor called yudit but
> fonts (and kmap ??) for Tamil are not available)

I do not have any idea in this matter.  However, if you are a
GNU/Linux user, you can make use of gedit with properly configured
input method, to create unicode documents.

> 3. Does XeTeX support Mathematics just as LaTeX does ??

100%.  You may kindly note that XeTeX is a compiler just like TeX,
pdfTeX, Omega, Aleph, LuaTeX, etc while LaTeX is a set of macros
written in TeX language like ConTeXt, Lollipop, eplain, plain, etc.
Any compiler can be used with any macro package.  So, pdfTeX can be
used with plain, eplain, LaTeX or ConTeXt.  In the same manner, XeTeX
can also be used with all these macro packages.

> 4. Does it require installing any fonts (OpenType or TrueType) to be
> installed on the PC used

The biggest advantage of using XeTeX is that it has the additional
capability of using the system fonts already available your system
without going through the horrendous task of renaming your fonts as
per Karl Berry scheme and other font juggleries associated with it.
You can straight forwardly make use of the system fonts.  If you are a
Mac OSX user, you have the additional power of using all the advanced
font features provided by OS X.

Happy TeXing and best regards

-- 
Nina