Re: org-mode export to (latex) PDF

[Maxim Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com>]

On 10/07/2021 23:44, Stefan Nobis wrote:
> Maxim Nikulin writes:
> 
>> (add-to-list 'org-latex-inputenc-alist '("utf8" . "utf8x"))
>> so I am unaware whether \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc} has any drawbacks.
> 
> Do not do this. Both, utf8x and ucs, are obsolete and deprecated for
> quite some time.

Maybe, I have seen such warnings. However I have tested neither utf8 nor 
utf8x on real examples. That is why I am unaware what can be broken in 
particular. For small examples with various symbols outside of ASCII, 
utf8x may give better support.

Last time I did something serious with LaTeX, bibtex was 8bit internally 
(unicode version had not reached stable Linux distributions, pybtex was 
buggy), so that time I used 8bit charset.

> For proper unicode support, switch from pdflatex to lualatex or
> xelatex. With these newer backends (and proper adjustments for the
> LaTeX preamble generated by Org) Unicode should work out of the box
> (if the font supports the requested Unicode characters).

Maybe my expectation from proper unicode support was too optimistic. I 
see the reason why preamble is necessary with 8bit encodings. I 
appreciate possibility to easily specify particular ttf or otf font. I 
do not like that it is necessary to specify *all* fonts, otherwise some 
characters are missed or compilation fails with error. I do not know if 
new engines allows to get list of available fonts and to choose a set of 
fonts with better coverage than lmodern.

I have tried LuaLaTeX with the following file. From some examples I have 
found, I expect, further tuning is required. Apparent problem is missed 
unicode characters in math mode. I admit that polyglossia is unavoidable 
for any real text but I do not like that \set…font commands are mandatory.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage{russian}
\setotherlanguage{english}
\setmainfont{CMU Serif} % breaks ∞
\setsansfont{CMU Sans Serif}
\setmonofont{CMU Typewriter Text}

\begin{document}
Test¹ of superscript and ½ fraction.

\textbf{Теорема.} \emph{Пусть} $α → ∞$ и $\beta \to \infty$.

\verb=Катет= и \textsf{гипотенуза}.

Åå. Text Greek α.
\end{document}


> (setq org-latex-default-packages-alist
>          '(("AUTO" "inputenc" t ("pdflatex"))
>            ("T1" "fontenc" t ("pdflatex"))

I just have realized that fontenc behavior should be similar to inputenc 
and babel, e.g. something like \usepackage[T1,T2A]{fontenc} should be 
used for Russian.