Re: org-mode export to (latex) PDF

[Stefan Nobis <stefan-ml@snobis.de>]

Maxim Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> writes:

> Do Unicode TeX engines support such combination of fonts?

Yes, they do.

My rather long response was due to my impression that you are quite
surprised that not everything is supported with the default
configuration as you expected.

I wanted to highlight that it is even today a rather hard problem to
mix different scripts (even if typographic quality does not matter)
and that there are quite different expectations of what a sensible
default should look like.

> There are two quite distinct cases: documents with carefully chosen
> fonts (e.g. a book) and everyday notes when particular font is not
> so important.

Yes, indeed. And I hope you see that these two requirements are not
easily satisfied with the same default configuration (and I would say
this is a understatement). The LaTeX community has chosen to prefer a
minimum typographic quality for their defaults and the majority still
concentrates more on latin scripts.

And as I said: A good multi-lingual support for Org is a really huge
undertaking. Unicode alone solves only a rather minor part of these
challenges.

> I mean detection if LuaLaTeX or XeLaTeX is usable from Org code.

Org should be rather flexible about the configured engines. There are
reasons why today all three engine are quite alive and used by
different users. I think it would be possible to improve the support
for all three engines, make the selection easier for the Org user and
go some first steps in better supporting different scripts and
languages. But it is not easy and not a matter of a handful lines of
code.

> Randomly chosen examples: "日本", "多喝水", "📞".

The last glyph ("TELEPHONE RECEIVER") is not visible for me. Remember,
that Unicode gets expanded quite often and it is not easy for font
developers to keep up. I still think that the expectation, that Org
and/or LaTeX will support the whole Unicode range out of the box is a
little bit too far fetched.

-- 
Until the next mail...,
Stefan.