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I was playing with numbers in my middle school math club and found a beautiful pattern. I presented my idea in front of my club mates. The teacher was impressed with my result and suggested I write a short manuscript and have it published somewhere. I thought it was a great idea so I agreed. It took over six months to get used to latex but I think it was worth it. I had some previous experience with the Lua language so I chose LuaLaTeX for my document. It was a short one page article but I was still satisfied with it.

I searched for journals that had writings similar to my skill level. I sent them my LuaLaTeX file and the pdf file resulting from it via email. They reacted positively to the content but asked me to write in plain latex because they do not use LuaLaTeX. It took a few more weeks to convert to LaTeX.

I have never maintained a journal so I didn't know that it wasn't as simple as just ordering the articles in the right order then gluing them together. Will I face similar barriers in high school, university and beyond if I keep using LuaLaTeX and not LaTeX? Are engines that extend beyond LaTeX such as LuaLaTeX and XeLaTeX to be avoided in environments where I do not produce all the content of the publication?

Ingmar
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dzn01744
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    Welcoming to TeX.SE. – Mico Aug 22 '23 at 20:34
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    Since "variations of LaTeX" isn't all that descriptive, you may want to change the title of your posting to "Is LuaLaTeX generally discouraged by journals?" – Mico Aug 22 '23 at 20:36
  • Often journal have options to accept just a PDF, regardless of how it was produced. It's more a question for academics.SE, btw. –  Aug 22 '23 at 20:38
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    many journals that accept latex just do that as an author convenience and they don't use tex at all, so they just want simple markup they can convert, so no user defined style changes or Lua or .... – David Carlisle Aug 22 '23 at 20:50

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