On Thu, Apr 10 2025, Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez <paag...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jürgen writes: > >>Am 03.04.25 um 09:37 Uhr schrieb Ihor Radchenko: >>>> I don't agree. Users who are apparently happy with LuaLaTeX should >>>> have no problems with pdflatex and UTF8. >>> If you know an easy and universal way to support UTF8 is pdflatex, >>> please do share. >> >> I am sorry I could not read all the discussion up to here, but you might >> like to take a look at this discussion that took place on several TUG >> mailing lists whe TeX Live 2025 was published over the last weeks as to >> whether to use pdftex, luatex, or xetex as the default engine. It turns >> out that only luatex is capable of producing accessible pdf, next comes >> pdftex, "albeit with some restrictions", and xetex falls short of this >> feature. So most probably only luatex will be used in the long run, as >> accessibility will be required for most publications, at least for >> scientific papers. This is not only a ITF-8 issue. I'm surprised TeX >> Live is said not to work properly out of the box on some Linux >> distributions, hard to believe it's true. Please check again and report >> to the appropriate tracker in case it really does not work on your system. >> >> https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2025-March/051258.html > >> Regards, >> Jürgen. > > Hi Jürgen, > > thanks a lot for the pointers and for sniffing the LaTeX mailing lists. > There is so much going on, that it is impossible to follow everything. > > From the message I gather that accessible documents is the main target for > the TeX people (which is more than reasonable) and that speed is only > secondary. > > Now the question seems to be whether latex-preview could "live an > independent life" with pdflatex at the heart of it's tooling, whereas > document production could "move on" to use lualatex as the default tool to > generate the PDFs. I may be overoptimistic in thinking that pdflatex and > lualatex have still a long way together, whereas xetex seems to be fading > away. As a result of Karthik's contribution, I have been using pdflatex and lualatex for preview purposes in the last couple weeks. I use a lot of utf-8 in my org documents. Pdflatex just cannot compete for typesetting, even in preview. My feeling is that for modestly complicated snippets, lualatex is a better choice, despite the slower speed. Having said that, I do not use a continual previewer like Karthik demonstrated in one of his screencasts. So, my 2¢ is that there is no advantage to the bifurcation that you are suggesting. Leo
