Re: exporting to PDF multi-lingual document

[Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net>]

Stefan Nobis <stefan-ml@snobis.de> writes:

> On the other hand: Luatex is much more flexible and has better support
> for modern fonts and modern font render engines.

So does xelatex, AFAIU.

> It depends what one assumes to be the most common use case for Org. If
> it's many rather short and simple documents then pdftex should suffice
> most of the time and the fast compile speed will matter. If we want to
> support as many different situations out of the box, I think luatex
> would be the better/easier way - at the cost of slower compilation
> speeds.

The problem with luatex (and xelatex) is export to .tex files. Org is
sometimes used when writing research papers and journals generally
demand pdflatex, not luatex.

Also, some people explicitly add LaTeX headers to their documents -
headers that may or may not be compatible with LuaTeX.

What could be done is having #+LATEX_COMPILER set to something like
'auto by default - use luatex for some non-English #+LANGUAGE settings,
but fall back when headers are customized.

> Additionally, we might try to detect situations in which
> luatex would be the better choice (e.g. certain languages). But this
> would certainly be more work and lead to more complex code.

The most immediate problem to solve is figuring out a good universal
preamble that will work with UTF8 Org sources that can contain arbitrary
(known) languages.

The code will be more complex, but Timothy's work on conditional
preamble should make things much easier. So, complexity should not stop
us - the necessary infrastructure will be in place sooner or later.
https://list.orgmode.org/orgmode/875yc95rxp.fsf@tec.tecosaur.net/

> Another approach: Use pdftex for simple/short documents and make
> selection of luatex as backend engine per document as easy as
> possible.

It is already easy - #+LATEX_COMPILER

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>,
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