Re: TeX and Malayalam poetry

Dear Kiran,

On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 5:40 PM, Kiran Raj <[email protected]> wrote:

> Congratulations and thank sir for the post. It looks so beautiful !. I am a
>

Thank you very much for your nice compliments, Kiran.


> Ph. D scholar in engineering and a LaTeX user for the past one year. Can
> you please tell me, at what occasions should I have to switch to other
> options like XeTeX, LuaTeX etc and what they offer more compared to LaTeX
> pertinent to writing technical documents ?
>

You might kindly note the distinction between macro libraries and compilers
and shall not be confused between these two since they all have TeX
suffixed to the names.

LaTeX is a macro package written in TeX's macro language. So also, amstex,
context, eplain, plain, etc.

TeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, Omega, LuaTeX, . . . are various kinds of TeX compilers
which you can use in combination with any of the macro packages listed
above.

TeX + plain macros  = default TeX (Knuth uses this)
TeX + LaTeX macros = commonly used by general TeX users
TeX + ConTeXt = ConTeXt system developed by Hans Hagen of Pragma
. . .

You can replace TeX in the above list with pdfTeX, XeTeX, . . . and the
like depending on your requirements. TeX provides dvi output; pdfTeX gives
you pdf output by default (optionally dvi also); XeTeX gives you pdf output
(through dvipdfmx), is Unicode compliant and can make use of open type and
true type fonts in your system; LuaTeX is built upon pdfTeX qnd UTF-8
compliant. Further, it has Lua libraries as a scripting language; metapost
libraries for graphics; fontforge libraries for font manipulation, etc. It
is supposedly far more potential/superior TeX compiler poised to replace
others in future.

Hope, I have answered your question.

Best regards
-- 
Radhakrishnan (രാധാകൃഷ്ണന്‍)
<https://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=3748532478409855227>
സായാഹ്ന ഫൗണ്ടേഷൻ<https://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=3748532478409855227>
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