Re: [RFC] latex preview and pdflatex-only packages

[Juergen Fenn <jfenn@gmx.net>]

Am 18.08.24 um 14:01 Uhr schrieb Ihor Radchenko:
>> More general: Out there are quite some package that support only one
>> of the current engines xelatex, lualatex, or pdflatex. My gut feeling
>> is, that the majority works with any engine and more and more packages
>> tend to support the more modern engines xelatex and lualatex, while
>> dropping support for pdflatex.
> Not sure here. Simply because some major publishers still hold on
> pdflatex. Or do you have other information?

There have been two lines of development in TeX lately. On the one hand
there are packages that require features from the LaTeX3 kernel. This
should not pose a problem because LaTeX3 will be installed on a recent
TeX Live system. And then, there are packages that require a particular
TeX engine. You have to take a look into the package documentation for
that. No general advice can be made here. That's probably why Stefan
above wrote about his "gut feeling". If you want to restrict Org export
to LaTeX packages that will be found on most TeX systems, I suggest you
use those packages that are either "required" by the LaTeX Project for
any LaTeX installation, or that you document which additional packages
should be installed in order for Org export to work. Most packages that
require xetex or luatex will deal with special fonts or require lua
scripting in the background. So I personally don't see a reason to use
them for exporting a document to LaTeX. FWIW, pdftex, xetex, and luatex
all use UTF-8 as standard input encoding. LaTeX also switched to UTF-8 a
while ago. And, pdftex is by no means deprecated or out of date etc. In
fact, it's the standard TeX engine and will remain so for some time. You
might like to ask the TeX Live developers on their mailing list or the
LaTeX Project on GitHub for some more advice.

Best regards,
Jürgen.