LuaTeX vs XeTeX

[Dr Eberhard Lisse]

Stve,

I like the Noto fonts, but my understanding is that all TeX Gyre
fonts also work under PDFLaTeX.

But, LUA is really cool.

You can put simple stuff into the preamble like

	\usepackage{luacode}
	\begin{luacode*}
	   socket = require "socket"
	   function hostname()
		  local hname = socket.dns.gethostname():gsub('.local','' )
		  return hname
	   end
	\end{luacode*}
	\newcommand\hostname{\directlua{tex.sprint(hostname())}}

which then makes the name of the box you are compiling to PDF on (which
I like in my little handbook) available to ERT (or footers defined in
the preamble).

And more complicated stuff, from calculating Expected Date of Delivery
from Last Menstrual Period, Body Mass Index from weight and height, or
even calculating the nearest Friday of a calculated date (thanks
Herbert :-)-O), access to the differend SQL databases and whatnot.

Of course one can do most of that also in R with knitR but that has
a lot of overhead.

PDFLaTeX is much faster that LuaLaTeX but to be hoest, nowadays the
day to day stuff is so fast anyway that that doesn't matter.



On 2021-12-18 00:58 , Steve Litt via lyx-users wrote:
> Herbert Voss via lyx-users said on Thu, 16 Dec 2021 15:31:15 +0100
> 
> 
>> - no more fiddling around with the encoding, everything is UTF-8
>> - no more restrictions in using fonts, all current types are
>> supported, like pfb, ttf, utf, ttc, ...
>> - easy integration of the script language Lua into a document
> 
> That's what brought me to LuaTeX and LuaLaTeX: The ability to use TeX
> Gyre Schola font, which looks better than everything except its
> lookalike Century Schoolbook, but somehow, about 6 years ago, Century
> Schoolbook stopped working for me.
> 
> Since beginning to use LuaTeX, I've enjoyed that it does everything
> the others do, and by using it all the time, I gain expertise and
> everything's easier.
> 
> 
> SteveT
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