Back in 1978, when the TeX project began, there were no scalable fonts. If your printer supported 10 point and 12 point text, those were the two sizes you could use in your documents. Even when the Macintosh came along, you still had a fixed set of text sizes, unless you were rich enough to have a PostScript laser printer.
TeX, on the other hand, had METAFONT — a system for defining vector fonts, which could then be rasterized at any size, for any printer that could handle a bitmap image. So for years, TeX was the only way a lot of people could create documents using a wide range of typeface sizes and styles.
Then around 1990, Adobe Type Manager (ATM) went on the market. If you installed it on your Macintosh or Microsoft Windows system, you could use PostScript fonts on your desktop at any size, and ATM would handle the rasterization for your screen — and for your printer, if it wasn’t a Postscript printer. Suddenly you could have any font size you wanted, anywhere.
Fast forward 20 years, and vector fonts are ubiquitous; even my phone has vector fonts. Type 1, TrueType, OpenType… but not METAFONT. Like Plain TeX, METAFONT was way too complicated for most graphic designers. So nowadays, like everyone else, I want to be able to use the dozens of attractive vector typefaces installed on my computer, rather than the rather anemic selection of METAFONT fonts.
Then there was TeX’s way of getting output to the printer. First you ran your source TeX file through TeX itself; that spat out a DVI file with just the typeset text. Then you took the DVI file, and ran it through a converter which would insert the diagrams from their files, embed a set of fonts generated by METAFONT, and output a PostScript file. Then you either sent your PostScript file to your PostScript printer, if you were lucky enough to have one; or else you ran the PostScript through another converter (such as GhostScript) to turn it into your printer’s proprietary printer dump format (such as ESC/P or PCL, and copied that to your printer. It was all tedious but necessary in 1990. Today, it looks insane.
Then there’s the whole character encoding issue. Back in 1990, the only thing that could reliably be translated between different computer systems was plain ASCII text, so TeX had macros for curly quotes, accented characters, typographic dashes, dingbats, non-Roman alphabets, and so on. Nowadays, every major OS supports Unicode, so you can put Cyrillic or Greek text in your document on the Mac and be reasonably confident it’ll still be there if you open the file in Linux.
So TeX has been adapted to the modern world. pdfTeX got rid of the DVI stage, and went straight from TeX source files to PDF files; it later added support for microtypography. XeTeX got rid of METAFONT fonts, and allowed direct access to OS-installed vector fonts; it also added Unicode support. LuaTeX extended pdfTeX by adding Lua as an extra scripting language, allowing more complicated functionality to be supported than was feasible with TeX macros, and also added OS font support. LuaTeX has now been adopted as the successor to pdfTeX.
Since I wanted the most up-to-date Unicode and font support, I set about trying ConTeXt on Linux and Mac, using both LuaTeX and XeTeX. I created a document using a custom set of fonts — one OpenType, one Type 1, and one TrueType.
XeTeX was far easier to set up. Whereas LuaTeX requires that you set up environment variables and run a script to scan your fonts, XeTeX just calls the OS font routines. However, LuaTeX gets points because it’s the only supported engine for the latest ConTeXt release, Mark IV.
On the minus side, XeTeX on Linux is a bit buggier than on the Mac, as it’s a recent port; I had trouble with some Type 1 fonts. LuaTeX is not without bugs either: the ConTeXt mailing list recently discussed a bug triggered by a 5,000 page document, which caused LuaTeX to crash on page 3,987. That bug is fixed in a recent beta. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to try assembling a 4,000 page document in Microsoft Office, I’d be interested to know if it’s possible.
Since my documents are well under 3,987 pages, I’ve been happy with LuaTeX so far. So I had picked my TeX platform: ConTeXt running on LuaTeX. Now I had to sort out my macros and other necessary tools.