Typesetting a computer-science book with XeLaTeX+biber
For the next computer-science book I'm planning to edit, I'm considering switching from pdflatex+bibtex to a more modern setup.
To get an idea of the contents, think of 400 pages in the style of "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest (mild mathematics, some pseudocode in a self-invented, GCL-like programming language, some self-drawn diagrams, a few images), but to be sent as a PDF file to Springer. The book's main language is going to be German, and there will be a tiny amount of typesetting in other languages (including mostly other Latin-based languages, Russian, and Hebrew math letters when I expend all the Latin letters). I am planning to produce an index (or indices) and a table of notation, ideally both with the glossaries package. The diagrams and graphs are likely to be drawn using TikZ.
Based on my experiences so far, I consider choosing XeLaTeX and/or biber. XeLaTeX would give me, as far as my tests go, the direct advantage that certain characters that now go as garbage to the text layer of the PDF file produced would become meaningful, selectable characters. With biber, typesetting a multilingual bibliography would get easier.
(An aside has to be made. I did consider LuaLaTeX as an alternative to XeLaTeX. But my tests so far showed that LuaLaTeX is way slower than XeLaTeX on my input, which would make my typesetter's daily life harder, especially for a huge book. I had no experience with ConTeXt and cannot say anything about it so far. SILE apparently has no maths as of today, or at least I don't see it in the manual.)
There is a high chance that SVMono will have to be adapted to XeLaTeX. Concerning the fonts, I'm looking at the TeX Gyre family. Moreover, I took a look at Moving from pdfLaTeX to XeTeX - what do I need to know?, Frequently loaded packages: Differences between pdfLaTeX and XeLaTeX, Transparency in tikz, preview package and xelatex, PSTricks transparency does not work with MikTeX's XeLaTeX, and PDF Layers (OCG) using xelatex and considered them non-issues in my case.
Now, has anyone tried to use XeLaTeX+biber for tasks similar to the one described above, and, if so, what were your experiences? E.g.:
How hard was it to adapt SVMono to XeLaTeX and/or biber?
Was there a barrier that you could not overcome (or not overcome easily) and had to invest major unplanned effort or to switch back to pdflatex+bibtex?
Which pitfalls are to be avoided?
Was there any free lunch you did not expect?
xetex biber book-design sv-classes tex-gyre-math
asked Aug 13 '18 at 14:19
user49915user49915
45317
This question has an open bounty worth +50
reputation from user49915 ending in 7 days.
This question has not received enough attention.
I expect a detailed reply to sub-questions 1.-4. for particular computer-science books that the person who answers adapted to xelatex+biber.
|
show 5 more comments
For the next computer-science book I'm planning to edit, I'm considering switching from pdflatex+bibtex to a more modern setup.
To get an idea of the contents, think of 400 pages in the style of "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest (mild mathematics, some pseudocode in a self-invented, GCL-like programming language, some self-drawn diagrams, a few images), but to be sent as a PDF file to Springer. The book's main language is going to be German, and there will be a tiny amount of typesetting in other languages (including mostly other Latin-based languages, Russian, and Hebrew math letters when I expend all the Latin letters). I am planning to produce an index (or indices) and a table of notation, ideally both with the glossaries package. The diagrams and graphs are likely to be drawn using TikZ.
Based on my experiences so far, I consider choosing XeLaTeX and/or biber. XeLaTeX would give me, as far as my tests go, the direct advantage that certain characters that now go as garbage to the text layer of the PDF file produced would become meaningful, selectable characters. With biber, typesetting a multilingual bibliography would get easier.
(An aside has to be made. I did consider LuaLaTeX as an alternative to XeLaTeX. But my tests so far showed that LuaLaTeX is way slower than XeLaTeX on my input, which would make my typesetter's daily life harder, especially for a huge book. I had no experience with ConTeXt and cannot say anything about it so far. SILE apparently has no maths as of today, or at least I don't see it in the manual.)
There is a high chance that SVMono will have to be adapted to XeLaTeX. Concerning the fonts, I'm looking at the TeX Gyre family. Moreover, I took a look at Moving from pdfLaTeX to XeTeX - what do I need to know?, Frequently loaded packages: Differences between pdfLaTeX and XeLaTeX, Transparency in tikz, preview package and xelatex, PSTricks transparency does not work with MikTeX's XeLaTeX, and PDF Layers (OCG) using xelatex and considered them non-issues in my case.
Now, has anyone tried to use XeLaTeX+biber for tasks similar to the one described above, and, if so, what were your experiences? E.g.:
How hard was it to adapt SVMono to XeLaTeX and/or biber?
Was there a barrier that you could not overcome (or not overcome easily) and had to invest major unplanned effort or to switch back to pdflatex+bibtex?
Which pitfalls are to be avoided?
Was there any free lunch you did not expect?
xetex biber book-design sv-classes tex-gyre-math
asked Aug 13 '18 at 14:19
user49915user49915
45317
This question has an open bounty worth +50
reputation from user49915 ending in 7 days.
This question has not received enough attention.
I expect a detailed reply to sub-questions 1.-4. for particular computer-science books that the person who answers adapted to xelatex+biber.
@TeXnician Are you saying it would work by default with XeLaTeX? (My very simple "Hello-world-like" tests show no error, but it may get nasty later.)
– user49915
Aug 13 '18 at 14:29
1
Sorry, I missed the part with PDF sending to Springer. I'm just saying that you should try to use it with XeLaTeX and adapt what doesn't work. But really your question is very localized on the one hand, asking for a special case, and too broad on the other hand, no clear issues, but many questions you want a answer to. It is not the best choice for our format here.
– TeXnician
Aug 13 '18 at 14:31
@TeXnician Well, I don't expect an fully-covering, all-inclusive answer here. Sharing any experience will do.
– user49915
Aug 13 '18 at 14:33
But from my experience, having written a German computer sciene book in LaTeX, I would say it is possible to do so with XeLaTeX and biber (I have switched to LuaLaTeX after starting with XeLaTeX, but that's another story). Let's say I am a LuaLaTeX-only user nowadays (except for this site) and it works quite well, even adapting strange pdflatex templates, once you have the knowledge to do that.
– TeXnician
Aug 13 '18 at 14:33
1
Well, I tried the switch from pdfLaTeX to XeLaTeX a couple of years ago, for a large set of documents (much bigger than your 400-page book project) with multiple languages (English, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, etc...) I don't really remember the details, but I gave up pretty soon - there were a seemingly endless series of hassles with incompatibilities to overcome, for zero real benefit. And I find LuaTeX is too slow for doing any serious work - it reminds me too much of using of TeX on the original IBM PC back in the 1980s, taking several minutes per page of output!
– alephzero
Aug 13 '18 at 14:56
|
show 5 more comments
For the next computer-science book I'm planning to edit, I'm considering switching from pdflatex+bibtex to a more modern setup.
To get an idea of the contents, think of 400 pages in the style of "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest (mild mathematics, some pseudocode in a self-invented, GCL-like programming language, some self-drawn diagrams, a few images), but to be sent as a PDF file to Springer. The book's main language is going to be German, and there will be a tiny amount of typesetting in other languages (including mostly other Latin-based languages, Russian, and Hebrew math letters when I expend all the Latin letters). I am planning to produce an index (or indices) and a table of notation, ideally both with the glossaries package. The diagrams and graphs are likely to be drawn using TikZ.
Based on my experiences so far, I consider choosing XeLaTeX and/or biber. XeLaTeX would give me, as far as my tests go, the direct advantage that certain characters that now go as garbage to the text layer of the PDF file produced would become meaningful, selectable characters. With biber, typesetting a multilingual bibliography would get easier.
(An aside has to be made. I did consider LuaLaTeX as an alternative to XeLaTeX. But my tests so far showed that LuaLaTeX is way slower than XeLaTeX on my input, which would make my typesetter's daily life harder, especially for a huge book. I had no experience with ConTeXt and cannot say anything about it so far. SILE apparently has no maths as of today, or at least I don't see it in the manual.)
There is a high chance that SVMono will have to be adapted to XeLaTeX. Concerning the fonts, I'm looking at the TeX Gyre family. Moreover, I took a look at Moving from pdfLaTeX to XeTeX - what do I need to know?, Frequently loaded packages: Differences between pdfLaTeX and XeLaTeX, Transparency in tikz, preview package and xelatex, PSTricks transparency does not work with MikTeX's XeLaTeX, and PDF Layers (OCG) using xelatex and considered them non-issues in my case.
Now, has anyone tried to use XeLaTeX+biber for tasks similar to the one described above, and, if so, what were your experiences? E.g.:
How hard was it to adapt SVMono to XeLaTeX and/or biber?
Was there a barrier that you could not overcome (or not overcome easily) and had to invest major unplanned effort or to switch back to pdflatex+bibtex?
Which pitfalls are to be avoided?
Was there any free lunch you did not expect?
xetex biber book-design sv-classes tex-gyre-math
asked Aug 13 '18 at 14:19
user49915user49915
45317
For the next computer-science book I'm planning to edit, I'm considering switching from pdflatex+bibtex to a more modern setup.
To get an idea of the contents, think of 400 pages in the style of "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest (mild mathematics, some pseudocode in a self-invented, GCL-like programming language, some self-drawn diagrams, a few images), but to be sent as a PDF file to Springer. The book's main language is going to be German, and there will be a tiny amount of typesetting in other languages (including mostly other Latin-based languages, Russian, and Hebrew math letters when I expend all the Latin letters). I am planning to produce an index (or indices) and a table of notation, ideally both with the glossaries package. The diagrams and graphs are likely to be drawn using TikZ.
Based on my experiences so far, I consider choosing XeLaTeX and/or biber. XeLaTeX would give me, as far as my tests go, the direct advantage that certain characters that now go as garbage to the text layer of the PDF file produced would become meaningful, selectable characters. With biber, typesetting a multilingual bibliography would get easier.
(An aside has to be made. I did consider LuaLaTeX as an alternative to XeLaTeX. But my tests so far showed that LuaLaTeX is way slower than XeLaTeX on my input, which would make my typesetter's daily life harder, especially for a huge book. I had no experience with ConTeXt and cannot say anything about it so far. SILE apparently has no maths as of today, or at least I don't see it in the manual.)
There is a high chance that SVMono will have to be adapted to XeLaTeX. Concerning the fonts, I'm looking at the TeX Gyre family. Moreover, I took a look at Moving from pdfLaTeX to XeTeX - what do I need to know?, Frequently loaded packages: Differences between pdfLaTeX and XeLaTeX, Transparency in tikz, preview package and xelatex, PSTricks transparency does not work with MikTeX's XeLaTeX, and PDF Layers (OCG) using xelatex and considered them non-issues in my case.
Now, has anyone tried to use XeLaTeX+biber for tasks similar to the one described above, and, if so, what were your experiences? E.g.:
How hard was it to adapt SVMono to XeLaTeX and/or biber?
Was there a barrier that you could not overcome (or not overcome easily) and had to invest major unplanned effort or to switch back to pdflatex+bibtex?
Which pitfalls are to be avoided?
Was there any free lunch you did not expect?
xetex biber book-design sv-classes tex-gyre-math
xetex biber book-design sv-classes tex-gyre-math
asked Aug 13 '18 at 14:19
user49915user49915
45317
asked Aug 13 '18 at 14:19
user49915user49915
45317
edited Aug 13 '18 at 16:27
user49915
asked Aug 13 '18 at 14:19
user49915user49915
45317
asked Aug 13 '18 at 14:19
user49915user49915
45317
asked Aug 13 '18 at 14:19
user49915user49915
45317
45317
This question has an open bounty worth +50
reputation from user49915 ending in 7 days.
This question has not received enough attention.
I expect a detailed reply to sub-questions 1.-4. for particular computer-science books that the person who answers adapted to xelatex+biber.
This question has an open bounty worth +50
reputation from user49915 ending in 7 days.
This question has not received enough attention.
I expect a detailed reply to sub-questions 1.-4. for particular computer-science books that the person who answers adapted to xelatex+biber.
@TeXnician Are you saying it would work by default with XeLaTeX? (My very simple "Hello-world-like" tests show no error, but it may get nasty later.)
– user49915
Aug 13 '18 at 14:29
1
Sorry, I missed the part with PDF sending to Springer. I'm just saying that you should try to use it with XeLaTeX and adapt what doesn't work. But really your question is very localized on the one hand, asking for a special case, and too broad on the other hand, no clear issues, but many questions you want a answer to. It is not the best choice for our format here.
– TeXnician
Aug 13 '18 at 14:31
@TeXnician Well, I don't expect an fully-covering, all-inclusive answer here. Sharing any experience will do.
– user49915
Aug 13 '18 at 14:33
But from my experience, having written a German computer sciene book in LaTeX, I would say it is possible to do so with XeLaTeX and biber (I have switched to LuaLaTeX after starting with XeLaTeX, but that's another story). Let's say I am a LuaLaTeX-only user nowadays (except for this site) and it works quite well, even adapting strange pdflatex templates, once you have the knowledge to do that.
– TeXnician
Aug 13 '18 at 14:33
1
Well, I tried the switch from pdfLaTeX to XeLaTeX a couple of years ago, for a large set of documents (much bigger than your 400-page book project) with multiple languages (English, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, etc...) I don't really remember the details, but I gave up pretty soon - there were a seemingly endless series of hassles with incompatibilities to overcome, for zero real benefit. And I find LuaTeX is too slow for doing any serious work - it reminds me too much of using of TeX on the original IBM PC back in the 1980s, taking several minutes per page of output!
– alephzero
Aug 13 '18 at 14:56
|
show 5 more comments
@TeXnician Are you saying it would work by default with XeLaTeX? (My very simple "Hello-world-like" tests show no error, but it may get nasty later.)
– user49915
Aug 13 '18 at 14:29
1
Sorry, I missed the part with PDF sending to Springer. I'm just saying that you should try to use it with XeLaTeX and adapt what doesn't work. But really your question is very localized on the one hand, asking for a special case, and too broad on the other hand, no clear issues, but many questions you want a answer to. It is not the best choice for our format here.
– TeXnician
Aug 13 '18 at 14:31
@TeXnician Well, I don't expect an fully-covering, all-inclusive answer here. Sharing any experience will do.
– user49915
Aug 13 '18 at 14:33
But from my experience, having written a German computer sciene book in LaTeX, I would say it is possible to do so with XeLaTeX and biber (I have switched to LuaLaTeX after starting with XeLaTeX, but that's another story). Let's say I am a LuaLaTeX-only user nowadays (except for this site) and it works quite well, even adapting strange pdflatex templates, once you have the knowledge to do that.
– TeXnician
Aug 13 '18 at 14:33
1
Well, I tried the switch from pdfLaTeX to XeLaTeX a couple of years ago, for a large set of documents (much bigger than your 400-page book project) with multiple languages (English, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, etc...) I don't really remember the details, but I gave up pretty soon - there were a seemingly endless series of hassles with incompatibilities to overcome, for zero real benefit. And I find LuaTeX is too slow for doing any serious work - it reminds me too much of using of TeX on the original IBM PC back in the 1980s, taking several minutes per page of output!
– alephzero
Aug 13 '18 at 14:56
@TeXnician Are you saying it would work by default with XeLaTeX? (My very simple "Hello-world-like" tests show no error, but it may get nasty later.)
– user49915
Aug 13 '18 at 14:29
@TeXnician Are you saying it would work by default with XeLaTeX? (My very simple "Hello-world-like" tests show no error, but it may get nasty later.)
– user49915
Aug 13 '18 at 14:29
1
1
Sorry, I missed the part with PDF sending to Springer. I'm just saying that you should try to use it with XeLaTeX and adapt what doesn't work. But really your question is very localized on the one hand, asking for a special case, and too broad on the other hand, no clear issues, but many questions you want a answer to. It is not the best choice for our format here.
– TeXnician
Aug 13 '18 at 14:31
Sorry, I missed the part with PDF sending to Springer. I'm just saying that you should try to use it with XeLaTeX and adapt what doesn't work. But really your question is very localized on the one hand, asking for a special case, and too broad on the other hand, no clear issues, but many questions you want a answer to. It is not the best choice for our format here.
– TeXnician
Aug 13 '18 at 14:31
@TeXnician Well, I don't expect an fully-covering, all-inclusive answer here. Sharing any experience will do.
– user49915
Aug 13 '18 at 14:33
@TeXnician Well, I don't expect an fully-covering, all-inclusive answer here. Sharing any experience will do.
– user49915
Aug 13 '18 at 14:33
But from my experience, having written a German computer sciene book in LaTeX, I would say it is possible to do so with XeLaTeX and biber (I have switched to LuaLaTeX after starting with XeLaTeX, but that's another story). Let's say I am a LuaLaTeX-only user nowadays (except for this site) and it works quite well, even adapting strange pdflatex templates, once you have the knowledge to do that.
– TeXnician
Aug 13 '18 at 14:33
But from my experience, having written a German computer sciene book in LaTeX, I would say it is possible to do so with XeLaTeX and biber (I have switched to LuaLaTeX after starting with XeLaTeX, but that's another story). Let's say I am a LuaLaTeX-only user nowadays (except for this site) and it works quite well, even adapting strange pdflatex templates, once you have the knowledge to do that.
– TeXnician
Aug 13 '18 at 14:33
1
1
Well, I tried the switch from pdfLaTeX to XeLaTeX a couple of years ago, for a large set of documents (much bigger than your 400-page book project) with multiple languages (English, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, etc...) I don't really remember the details, but I gave up pretty soon - there were a seemingly endless series of hassles with incompatibilities to overcome, for zero real benefit. And I find LuaTeX is too slow for doing any serious work - it reminds me too much of using of TeX on the original IBM PC back in the 1980s, taking several minutes per page of output!
– alephzero
Aug 13 '18 at 14:56
Well, I tried the switch from pdfLaTeX to XeLaTeX a couple of years ago, for a large set of documents (much bigger than your 400-page book project) with multiple languages (English, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, etc...) I don't really remember the details, but I gave up pretty soon - there were a seemingly endless series of hassles with incompatibilities to overcome, for zero real benefit. And I find LuaTeX is too slow for doing any serious work - it reminds me too much of using of TeX on the original IBM PC back in the 1980s, taking several minutes per page of output!
– alephzero
Aug 13 '18 at 14:56
|
show 5 more comments
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@TeXnician Are you saying it would work by default with XeLaTeX? (My very simple "Hello-world-like" tests show no error, but it may get nasty later.)
– user49915
Aug 13 '18 at 14:29
1
Sorry, I missed the part with PDF sending to Springer. I'm just saying that you should try to use it with XeLaTeX and adapt what doesn't work. But really your question is very localized on the one hand, asking for a special case, and too broad on the other hand, no clear issues, but many questions you want a answer to. It is not the best choice for our format here.
– TeXnician
Aug 13 '18 at 14:31
@TeXnician Well, I don't expect an fully-covering, all-inclusive answer here. Sharing any experience will do.
– user49915
Aug 13 '18 at 14:33
But from my experience, having written a German computer sciene book in LaTeX, I would say it is possible to do so with XeLaTeX and biber (I have switched to LuaLaTeX after starting with XeLaTeX, but that's another story). Let's say I am a LuaLaTeX-only user nowadays (except for this site) and it works quite well, even adapting strange pdflatex templates, once you have the knowledge to do that.
– TeXnician
Aug 13 '18 at 14:33
1
Well, I tried the switch from pdfLaTeX to XeLaTeX a couple of years ago, for a large set of documents (much bigger than your 400-page book project) with multiple languages (English, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, etc...) I don't really remember the details, but I gave up pretty soon - there were a seemingly endless series of hassles with incompatibilities to overcome, for zero real benefit. And I find LuaTeX is too slow for doing any serious work - it reminds me too much of using of TeX on the original IBM PC back in the 1980s, taking several minutes per page of output!
– alephzero
Aug 13 '18 at 14:56