[tex-live] texworks in TL 2010

[Axel E. Retif]

On  13 Nov, 2010, at 03:01, Andreas Hirsch wrote:

> quoting Taco Hoekwater, [13.11.2010 09:45 +0100]:
> 
>> But I agree that for a non-beginner (*any* non-beginner) changing the 
>> default should be a simple one-time action, so the default may as well
>> be some latex-y format to please the crowd (however, I would have
>> chosen xelatex in that case ...)
> 
> This seems to me the same direction as Reinhard mentioned. As I'm only
> familiar with LaTeX I could not assess the situation.

First, let me start by saying that, with the exception of literally a couple of letters done in XeLaTeX, everything, absolutely everything I've ever done in TeX & friends, has been with pdfLaTeX. So the first thing I did with TeXworks for Linux and Windows, was to configure it to use pdfLaTeX.

> Maybe its a good idea for the usergroups to give a guideline 'from LaTeX
> to ...' which could help users like me to go towords the 'new common
> system' ...

First thing ---you don't have to put aside LaTeX at all: both XeTeX and LuaTeX have LaTeX formats (XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX), you just get some enhancements, like the option to use your system fonts. So you will still be using LaTeX, but with the xetex or luatex engines, instead of the pdftex engine. At your terminal or command prompt,

texdoc -s xetex (for a list of documents you already have in your distro)

texdoc luatex   (for the main reference)

Of course it will profit you to learn how to use packages specific to XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX, like fontspec.

See also

http://xml.web.cern.ch/XML/lgc2/xetexmain.pdf


Best,

Axel