Re: Xelatex basics

On May 30, 8:53 pm, Alexander Magidow <amagi...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hey everyone,

I am just wondering if there's a good document with the basics of
Xelatex - what sort of preamble stuff I need, what important commands
specific to Xelatex I need to know, etc.

The most basic file for xelatex is essentially the same as regular
latex. Don't use inputenc, and I'd say to load xltxtra (and xunicode,
probably):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
\usepackage{xunicode}
\begin{document}
\fontspec{Palatino Linotype}
Some text
\end{document}

xltxtra loads fontspec, which I think is pretty much "required" for
using xelatex without lots of unnecessary effort. The \fontspec macro
here loads any available font with a nice clean interface.

My main interest is typesetting all Arabic and mixed Arabic-English
documents using unicode input, without resorting to the rather rough
Arabxetex, but I really just need a quick sort of basic run through of
Xelatex.

Thank you,
Alex

PS- Has anyone had any success using biblatex with unicode non-Roman
alphabet inputs?

This (probably) won't work. biblatex still needs bibtex, which is
simply not able to cope with data in UTF8. Some characters survive,
others get clobbered, as bibtex(8) doesn't understand the extended
byte sequences. We all have to wait for a reliable alternative to
bibtex.

Joseph Wright

.