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Formatting Information — An introduction to typesetting with LATEX
Before you go any further there are two configurations you MUST check. As you may have seen in the list in the Preface above, there isn’t just one flavour of LATEX; and there are also some different bibliographic processors.
In this book I recommend that you use XƎLATEX unless you have a compelling reason not to. In my view the ability to handle natively-installed system fonts as well as UTF-8 characters while retaining the flexibility of the LATEX package system sets them well above the other processors (I’m not going to be dealing with Lua’s scripting or ConTEXt’s typographical abilities here).
For many years, there was only LATEX, which (like TEX) produced a .dvi (Device-Independent) file, which had to be converted to Postscript in an additional step. Except for a few specialist uses, this is now obsolete for most users;
In the 1990s, Hàn Thế Thành developed PDFTEX, which (along with pdfLATEX) produced PDF directly, as well as adding the possibility of benefits like microtypographic adjustments. While still common, pdfLATEX is obsolescent for most users;
Around 1996, Hagen Hans and Ton Otten released ConTEXt, using LATEX-like controls for more advanced classes of work, especially typographical manipulation for education, with most features built in, rather than via a package system;
More recently, Jonathan Kew developed XƎTEX, which not only recognises Unicode Transformation Format — 8-bit (UTF-8) characters directly, but can also use your system’s natively-installed TrueType Fonts (TTF) and OpenType Fonts (OTF) as well as those which come with LATEX;
Even more recently, Hans Hagen, Hartmut Henkel, Taco Hoekwater and Luigi Scarso have developed LuaTEX, an extended version of PDFTEX using Lua as an embedded scripting language, so you can write scripts (little programs) inside your LATEX document to generate your content dynamically. LuaLATEX also has some of the features of XƎLATEX such as support for TTF and OTF fonts.
There are still a few reasons some users stay with pdfLATEX or even the original LATEX. These include:
a few packages (now a very small number) which positively require a processor which creates an old-style .dvi file;
some specific packages still rely on raw Postscript features which need DVI-to-Postscript conversion first, before the PS output can be converted to PDF; and some DVI-to-Postscript converters cannot handle the (eXtended DVi (XDV)) format produced by XƎLATEX;
there are some other toolchains which depend on DVI files;
some older editors do not yet make it possible to select XƎLATEX or LuaLATEX as the processor.
There is a separate but closely related setting to choose the bibliographic formatter (old-style BIBTEX using .bst style files or the more recent biblatex package) and which bibliographic processor to use (bibtex or biber). If your documents don’t use bibliographic references, this will not be a concern for you.
Open your LATEX editor or online LATEX service and set the processor to be XƎLATEX.
In most cases this is a configuration setting in the menus or drop-downs (see Figure 1.2 above for examples).
Repeat the process to set your BIBTEX processor to biber
The relationship is that the biblatex package and the biber program, like XƎLATEX, deal natively with UTF-8 characters and are actively supported, whereas the .bst files and the bibtex processor have known problems with multibyte (accented and non-Latin) characters, and are no longer being developed. This makes the reference and citation of works in many languages difficult, if not impossible with .bst files and the bibtex processor. We will be dealing with this choice in more detail in § 5.3.2.1 below.
