[tex-live] texworks in TL 2010

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 13 November 2010 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.
 > 
 > 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' ...

A few days ago Manuel uploaded such guidelines for people who want to
switch to LuaLaTeX.

  texdoc lualatex-doc

For XeLaTeX you probably need much less, I suppose that the fontspec
documentation is a good starting point.  

You don't need inputenc.sty because both, XeTeX and LuaTeX, support
UTF-8 natively, and it's the default encoding in TeXworks anyway.
There are probably some issues with language dependent stuff, but I
assume that this is easier with the new engines.

 > There are questions like 'whats about my old stuff' or 'have I to
 > re-write my private sty-files' and more ...

You probably have to adapt macro packages if they rely on 8-bit
stuff.  But on a long-term basis I'm convinced that it's easier to
teach LaTeX on Unicode-aware engines.

And don't worry about *your* old stuff.  You can still compile it with
pdflatex.  The question is whether you want to bother newcomers with
internals like font encodings.

Regards,
  Reinhard 

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