Re: [AUCTeX] pstricks and TeX-PDF-mode

[Mosè Giordano]

Hi Mandar,

2015-10-13 17:40 GMT+02:00 Mandar Mitra <address@hidden>:
> Hello,
>
> I use xetex as my default TeX-engine, and it seems to handle pstricks without 
> any problems, but style/pstricks.el contains the following:
>
>     780    (unless (member "pst-pdf" TeX-active-styles)
>     781      (TeX-PDF-mode-off))
>
> So whenever I use the pstricks package, I have to turn TeX-PDF-mode on by 
> hand. Would it be ok to change the above to:
>
> (unless (or (member "pst-pdf" TeX-active-styles)
>             (eq TeX-engine 'xetex))
>    ...

Thanks for your suggestion, I applied this change.

> Irrelevant aside: xelatex handles included eps, pdf and jpg images, UTF-8 
> text, and as far as I can tell pstricks so much more easily than pdflatex. 
> Are there some downsides to it as well? I.e., is pdflatex better than xelatex 
> at doing anything?

The most notable limitation of XeLaTeX is its support in microtype
package, see for example the table at page 7 of microtype manual or
http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/118713/31416.  In addition in some
cases xelatex can be slower than pdflatex in compiling, but it uses
compact fonts, which result in smaller output, see
http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/14102/31416 and
http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/38145/31416

Bye,
Mosè