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Why would I use one instead of the other? I use LaTeX often, but normally let my IDE autodetect and deal with all that stuff on its own.
by tnecniv 9y ago
Why would I use one instead of the other? I use LaTeX often, but normally let my IDE autodetect and deal with all that stuff on its own.
- mkl 9y agoLaTeX generates DVI files, which need an extra conversion step to be generally useful. PDFTeX generates PDFs directly, and is generally preferable (unless you need legacy Postscript stuff). XeTeX and LuaTeX deal with Unicode properly and can use normal fonts. Both of these output PDF files directly, like PDFTeX, but have the above advantages over it (+more). LuaTeX, as the name suggests, embeds a Lua interpreter which enables far more sophisticated and performant programmatical things (at the cost of compatibility). XeTeX can cope with legacy Postscript things like PSTricks (ick!) by generating the Postscript and automatically converting it, but that's a slow process, and I often rewrite PSTricks pictures in TikZ or Asymptote when I have to deal with them. I generally use XeTeX, or LuaTeX when I'm okay with sacrificing compatibility for programmability.
- majewsky 9y agoIs PSTricks only a compatibility concern, or are people still doing new stuff in it? I can sort of imagine it... TeX packages are usually not the primary concern of the document author, so they will keep using what they learned 20 years ago. When I wrote my diploma thesis in 2010, I was given the thesis template that the whole working group were using. It was a steaming pile of hacks that had accumulated over the years, with the recommended compilation method being latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf, and only using graphics in EPS format (IIRC). And people were still writing `\"{a}` instead of `ä`. I replaced it with a new template for use with pdflatex that took advantage of such new-fangled stuff as inputenc, cmap, pdfx and hyperref, and committed it together with a long rant of a README that started with something along the lines of "When I looked on my watch, it was the fucking 21st century."
- mkl 9y agoUnfortunately, people are still using PSTricks for new stuff! I work with teaching materials at a university, and some of the people who wrote it first learned LaTeX in the 1980s, and haven't kept up with the three decades of improvements since. The obsolete hoop-jumping is kind of amazing, and I've been getting really good at complicated regex find and replace.
- messe 9y agoIt's worth noting as well that LuaTeX is the adopted successor to pdfTeX.
- leephillips 9y agoSimple examples of cool stuff you can do with luatex: https://lwn.net/Articles/723818/ https://lwn.net/Articles/723818/