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For various languages - at least Farsi, Arabic and Hebrew - the common wisdom and vast majority of users (AFAICT) have moved or are moving to XeTeX as the compi

For various languages - at least Farsi, Arabic and Hebrew - the common wisdom and vast majority of users (AFAICT) have moved or are moving to XeTeX as the compiler. The polyglossia package, which is the modern replacement of babel, requires XeTeX. IIANM, the effective Unicode + multi-language support of the other two is not at the same level.

nanna 6y ago
I don't actually think LuaTeX is capable of even handling right to left languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi. Only XeLaTeX is. Or am I wrong?
- svat 6y ago
  I think LuaTeX may have been sort-of capable for a while (with enough effort/workarounds by the user), but in 2019 or earlier, there was some work (initially by Khaled Hosny, who was also one of the major XeTeX maintainers a while ago) to have LuaTeX use HarfBuzz. (See http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-1/tb124hosny-harfbuzz.pdf http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-1/tb124hosny-harfbuzz.pdf) So (after some more work by the LuaTeX team) there's a LuaTeX variant called LuaHbTeX, which is the program invoked (since TeX Live 2020) when you write `lualatex`. The end result is that, to the best of my knowledge, LuaTeX can handle many of these things just as well as XeTeX. (See http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb127fischer-bangla.pdf http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb127fischer-bangla.pdf for an article from 2020, focusing on the case of the Bangla script, which is not right-to-left, but like all Indic/Brahmic scripts has some other issues related to complex text layout.)
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    Looks like the engine is getting there - but as of 2020 such use seems to still be semi-experimental. But good to known, thanks.
leephillips 6y ago
And plenty of people, like me, have moved to XeLaTeX because we prefer to type Greek or accented letters, and even math symbols, directly in our source rather than use the TeX commands for these things. Also, we want to use Opentype fonts and Fontspec.

nanna 6y ago

I don't actually think LuaTeX is capable of even handling right to left languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi. Only XeLaTeX is. Or am I wrong?

svat 6y ago
I think LuaTeX may have been sort-of capable for a while (with enough effort/workarounds by the user), but in 2019 or earlier, there was some work (initially by Khaled Hosny, who was also one of the major XeTeX maintainers a while ago) to have LuaTeX use HarfBuzz. (See http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-1/tb124hosny-harfbuzz.pdf http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-1/tb124hosny-harfbuzz.pdf) So (after some more work by the LuaTeX team) there's a LuaTeX variant called LuaHbTeX, which is the program invoked (since TeX Live 2020) when you write `lualatex`. The end result is that, to the best of my knowledge, LuaTeX can handle many of these things just as well as XeTeX. (See http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb127fischer-bangla.pdf http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb127fischer-bangla.pdf for an article from 2020, focusing on the case of the Bangla script, which is not right-to-left, but like all Indic/Brahmic scripts has some other issues related to complex text layout.)
- einpoklum 6y ago
  Looks like the engine is getting there - but as of 2020 such use seems to still be semi-experimental. But good to known, thanks.

leephillips 6y ago

And plenty of people, like me, have moved to XeLaTeX because we prefer to type Greek or accented letters, and even math symbols, directly in our source rather than use the TeX commands for these things. Also, we want to use Opentype fonts and Fontspec.