On choosing your weapons

Maybe you already know that ConTeXt is a set of macro that sits upon TeX and eases document authoring. It's like LaTeX, slightly different and less known. What perhaps you don't know is that w32tex comes with no less than THREE flavors of TeX:

• pdfTex, the old stalwart
• XeTeX, ported directly from OSX, where fonts "just work".
• LuaTeX, a TeX engine that uses Lua as an internal programming language.

Each of these engines has its merits and its flaws, when it comes to ConTeXt usage.

• XeTeX is, by far, the easiest to use when it comes to using fonts other than those provided with the standard TeX distro. It comes from OSX-land, and there, it leverages AAT font handling capabilities. It's been ported on linux and win32, where uses Freetype as font handler. However, when it comes to TYPEsetting, it falls -- at least under Win32 and Linux -- behind LuaTex and pdfTex. It lacks nifty microtypographic features found in the other two engines -- and if you typeset books with narrow columns, this can lead to a lot of unwanted aesthetical oddities.
• LuaTex is the future. It's quite easy to use OTF fonts, it's got micrographic features, it can leverage advanced OTF capabilities and, if you know the language, you can program new tricks in Lua. Its drawbacks are that it's still under development -- though quite solid and stable -- and, from an indie rpg author's perspective, suffers from some serious problem when it has to lay out figures and floating boxes that spread over more than one column -- More about this in a next post.
• pdfTex will be my weapon of choice. Sturdy, well-tested, full of features, handles full page width floats, OTF fonts and microtypography equally well. It's just more complicated to set up if you want to use other fonts than Computer Modern. However, once understood, font mechanism is not overly complicated and quite solid to boot

To recap, every code snipped I'll post will refer to the ConText/pdfTeX flavor, unless otherwise stated. I will, however, keep an eye to LuaTeX, since its potential is really enormous.