[OS X TeX] Macintouch report on TeX versus Word

Santosh Ansumali ansumali at gmail.com
Sun Jan 25 12:33:05 EST 2009


I  find portability and durability of latex as its biggest asset.
What I find amazing with latex is the ease with which I can operate
the same file over different operating system (Linux, winodws and
OS-X).
  Furthermore,  the ease with which a file written 10-15 year back can
be used in latex makes it obvious choice over any other alternate.
     I am completely unaware with Xelatex, but if it keeps the same
level of portability, then it is really a great news for many of us.
However,  so far I have found that  issues related with font makes any
modification of basic latex less portable. For example,
{\pmb \nabla} is still superior to   \boldsymbol{\nabla} in terms of
portability.  Although,  \boldsymbol{\nabla}  looks lot better but it
refused to work on some older linux machine.

Best,
Santosh



On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 1:00 AM, Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:
>
> On Jan 25, 2009, at 10:24 AM, Peter Dyballa wrote:
>
>> Am 25.01.2009 um 16:01 schrieb Jason Davies:
>>
>>> I assume that once i'm in XeLaTeX I can 'simply' type accents with option keys (etc) and it will read them fine?
>>
>> I think in the text body you can also use these characters directly since encoding files, loaded from the line \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc} or \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}, "translate" these Unicode characters to 7- or 8-bit LaTeX forms (which mostly fails for non-Latin!). It can be compared to Ross Moore's xunicode.sty which translates the LaTeX forms to Unicode.
>>
>>
>
>
> Howdy,
>
> Am I misinterpreting here? You don't need the inputenc package with xelatex if you save in UTF-8 since xetex assumes UTF-8 encoding. YOu only need to use the inputenc package with (pdf)latex since those assume ascii input.
>
> Good Luck,
>
> Herb Schulz
> (herbs at wideopenwest dot com)
>
>
>
>
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>



--
Santosh Ansumali,
Assist. Prof.
School of Chemical and Biomedical Engg.,
Nanyang Technological University
Block N1.2 Room no. B2-23
62 Nanyang Drive
Singpore 637459
Tel: + 65  6316 8941
URL:http://www.ntu.edu.sg/scbe/cbe/FacultyPP/Profile_Ansumali.html



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