[OS X TeX] latex and xelatex

[david craig]

The latest digest makes me curious what the end game of this forking 
brands of (la)tex (latex, pdftex, xelatex, luatex, whatever ...) is 
going to be.

>From the point of view of someone who does a lot of work in tex that 
needs to be very portable, and is often destined for third parties who 
insist on straight latex, I really don't want to have to keep track of 
which tex implementation I need on a document-by-document basis.   The 
merging of pdflatex with latex was a truly welcome development.

Is there some hope of this occurring with xelatex/luatex?  (If not, why 
not?)  I don't really see how it helps anyone to have this proliferation 
of (la)tex implementations with differing abilities.

Curious, and somewhat hopeful...

David Craig


<http://www.panix.com/~dac/>