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XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX support Unicode, and are perhaps also in some other ways better than pdfLaTeX.

However, are mathematical and logical journals prepared for submissions prepared with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX? Perhaps it is more prudent to prepare one's work with standard pdfLaTeX?

I am a bit wary about these things, as I one time when finishing an essay for a book was suddenly told that they just accepted word-submissions.

What is a prudent strategy if one wants to have an essay published in a good logic journal?

barbara beeton
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Frode Alfson Bjørdal
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    I can't speak for other publishers, but the AMS has been using XeLaTeX for several years. I don't know the status of LuaLaTeX there, but I'm skeptical. – barbara beeton May 13 '23 at 00:13
  • What you replied to was not well formed, I saw, and also not so relevant, so I deleted it. I do not understand the concept of "sale of service". AMS was established in 1888, I see, and Association of Symbolic Logic in 1936. – Frode Alfson Bjørdal May 13 '23 at 03:05
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    You presumably know much better than most users of this site which the "good logic journals" are. Why don't you contact the editorial offices of these journals directly and ask them if they accept manuscripts that require either XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX to compile them? – Mico May 13 '23 at 07:07
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    your question can't really be answered the typesetting system used by a journal is not always public it is commercial information. even if they accept latex source from authors as a convenience they may not use tex in production, so luatex or pdftex makes little difference compared to not using complicated local macros that break the conversion – David Carlisle May 13 '23 at 07:35
  • @barbarabeeton Thanks. So now I wonder what it means that something is opinion-based, but it at any rate seems to me that some use too much energy upon censoring others instead of contributing to resolve problems. Anyway, I received comments here, by you and others, which ere very useful to me. – Frode Alfson Bjørdal May 13 '23 at 16:56
  • @Sapiens -- Click on "opinion-based" in the closing notice. In the explanation, this statement appears: "If your question is closed, you will receive private feedback on the reason why it was closed." I gather this didn't happen. I'Il raise a question in the chat. (I'm curious too.) – barbara beeton May 13 '23 at 17:09
  • @Sapiens Asking how worthwhile something is, has always an opinion based component. Something which is worthwhile to you might not be worthwhile to somebody else. If you would like to avoid this, ask about specific, answerable facts instead which will help you make the decision if using an unicode aware engine is worthwhile for you. – samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz May 13 '23 at 19:40
  • @samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz My question concerning whether XeLaTeX or LuaLaTe are worthwhile using, when writing for publication, obviously had the same meaning as one of those you presuppose in the last sentence of your post. So if my question should be closed for being opinion-based, it ought to be the case that you delete your comment for the same reason. – Frode Alfson Bjørdal May 13 '23 at 21:55
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    I am not sure how to understand your question. If I only take "are XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX acceptable when submitting an article", this of course can only be answered by the publishers of the relevant journal. They may accept it or not and different journals will handle things differently. If you want to hand in a paper to different journals, it is probably a good idea to stick with PDFLaTeX to be as compatible as possible. But maybe even this is not the optimal way, since some journals might not accept TeX at all ... Be it as it may, your question can't really be answered on this site, I fear. – Jasper Habicht May 14 '23 at 00:17
  • Probably can just refer to xetex - Is XeLaTeX or pdfLaTeX best for preparing an article for mainstream publishers? - TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange and xetex - I am new to TeX. Should I use LaTeX, XeLaTeX, ...? - TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange. – user202729 May 14 '23 at 02:24
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    @JasperHabicht -- I agree that this question is probably answerable only by the editors of the journals involved, and not here. But it's certainly not "opinion-based"; "not suitable for this site" would be justifiable. – barbara beeton May 14 '23 at 02:27
  • @JasperHabicht Someone changed "worthwhile", in the title, to "acceptable"! These kinds of discussions are clearly in need of better moderation: it is not acceptable that someone edit the question when the question is at the center of attention, as here. – Frode Alfson Bjørdal May 14 '23 at 04:53
  • @user202729 Thanks! It is useful to see that questions as mine posed in the past were not closed for being opinion based. – Frode Alfson Bjørdal May 14 '23 at 05:03
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    @Sapiens I was preparing a possible answer to your original question (but it was then suddenly closed, so I couldn't post it). Personally, I have used both pdfLaTeX (for arXiv, or for a journal) and XeLaTeX (for distributing the pdf, and hosting the document on other websites); switching according to the use case. Your question has since evolved; if that could be an acceptable "prudent strategy" for you, I could post that as an answer with a minimal working example. It depends on how much XeLaTeX-specific features you want, but it's far less work than switching between Word and LaTeX for sure. – Alex May 22 '23 at 12:07
  • If what you mostly want to use from XeLaTeX are changes in the main text (e.g. writing in Hebrew), then it probably won't be a good approach however. – Alex May 22 '23 at 12:15
  • @Alex Thank you! Yes, I would very much like an answer as you suggest. – Frode Alfson Bjørdal May 22 '23 at 21:14
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    The arXiv open access archive supports only pdftex/pdflatex – Nasser May 24 '23 at 08:06
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    @Nasser Indeed, but it's easy to switch. For instance, I've written reports with XeLaTeX (reproducing an official Word template with several proprietary fonts), and then switched to pdflatex to upload those same reports on arXiv (with a generic layout and basic fonts/options). It requires only a small setup and works great in my experience. – Alex May 24 '23 at 09:14

1 Answers1

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As I said in the comments, this is an answer I prepared to the original question. Maybe you could consider having two separate main files, to be used with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX (e.g. your own copy that you could host and distribute), and pdflatex respectively:

xelatex main_xelatex.tex
pdflatex main_pdflatex.tex

The changes required to switch from one to the other are certainly not comparable to the hassle of having to switch between LaTeX and Word; it is rather quite small all in all. I have been doing that, personally.

You can then e.g. write your document's contents in a manuscript.tex file and use \input manuscript.tex in between begin{document} and end{document} to include the actual contents in both your setups.

You can moreover easily reuse this setup for your later publications.

I have just written a MWE demo for you. There are more elaborate ways to do it, but this is simple and works.

main_xelatex.tex
\documentclass[11pt, a4paper]{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{microtype}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{mathrsfs}
\usepackage{latexsym}
\usepackage{euscript}


\usepackage{lipsum}


\title{Lorem Ipsum}
\author{René Descartes}


\begin{document}
    \setmainfont{TheSansOsF} % or any other font you want XeLaTeX to use.
    \input manuscript.tex
\end{document}

Note that in this example main_xelatex.tex is compatible with both XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX.

main_pdflatex.tex
\documentclass[11pt, a4paper]{article}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{mathrsfs}
\usepackage{latexsym}
\usepackage{euscript}


\usepackage{lipsum}


\title{Lorem Ipsum}
\author{René Descartes}


\begin{document}
    \input manuscript.tex
\end{document}
manuscript.tex
\maketitle

\begin{abstract}
\lipsum[1]
\end{abstract}


\section{Introduction}
    \lipsum[2-4]


% ETC ...
XeLaTeX output

xelatex_result

pdflatex output

pdflatex_result

I am essentially always using XeLaTeX nowadays when writing documents, knowing it's easy to switch if needed (since I only input text, pictures, and maths). Of course, if you know for sure that what you are currently writing is for a paper in a specific journal, then contacting them beforehand is the safest approach I would say.

Alex
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