LuaTeX vs XeTeX

[Virgil Arrington]

On 12/16/2021 9:31 AM, Herbert Voss via lyx-users wrote:

LuaTeX ,and XeTeX too, are more or less frozen code, just like TeX.
Only bugs will be fixed. There are no good reasons _not_ to use LuaTeX instead
of pdfTeX:


I just performed an interesting experiment comparing the results from compiling the same source file with XeTeX, PDFLaTeX and LuaTeX. I was surprised by the results I got. In the past, I had found that, when I used XeTeX, I got more "overfull hboxes" with lines flowing past the right margin than I did with PDFLaTeX. I also would get *many* more hyphenated words with XeTeX than with PDFLaTeX. I assumed I would get similar results with LuaTeX, but I was pleasantly surprised.

For my experiment, took a 45 page paper I wrote for a former employer. For the PDFLaTeX compiled version, I used the mathpazo Palatino font that came with MikTeX and compiled it with PDFLaTeX. For the XeTeX and LuaTeX versions, I used Windows' Palatino Linotype font. All other settings were the same, including the use of the Microtype package in all versions.

In a single random paragraph, the resulting file compiled with XeTeX gave me eight hyphenated line endings. The same paragraph in the document compiled with LuaTeX gave me three hyphenated line endings, and the same paragraph in the document compiled with PDFLaTeX only gave me one hyphenated line ending.

XeTeX also gave me many overfull lines, in fact so many as to make the resulting document all but unusable. PDFLaTeX gave me a few, but I could work with them. I was surprised to see that LuaTeX appeared to give me the fewest overfull lines. I saw very few lines that extended beyond the right margin, and those I did happen to find extended such a small amount as to be all but unnoticeable.

I was very surprised by how different the results were when using XeTeX vs. LuaTeX. I had just assumed that the two engines would produce very similar results, but that was not the case at all. In fact, having seen LuaTeX's document, I can't imagine why anyone would choose XeTeX over LuaTeX. I was also surprised to see how well LuaTeX's results compared with PDFLaTeX's document. While LuaTex still gave me more hyphenated line endings, it gave me fewer noticeable overfull lines at the right margin.

Okay, now back to my "real" work.

Virgil







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