[leephillips]

I’ve been a luatex advocate in the past¹, but I use xetex instead, unless I need the Lua integration. The memory handling is the reason. I find that for documents with a lot of fonts, luatex eats all the memory available and then crashes, taking a huge amount of time to do so, whereas xetex just breezes through the same document.

[1]https://lwn.net/Articles/731581/

[2ion]

What's troublesome for me is that I have been using

* xetex when I needed a font that was not easily achievable in pdftex over the past decade * pdftex for everything else because microtype(TM) just works(TM) (even though kerning can be done using fontspec and font features in xetex).

I've tried luatex multiple times over the past decade, it was mostly just too slow. Now luatex is fast. But I have no idea if I now "should" use luatex over pdftex for best out-of-the-box results or not.

Unfortunately, switching to luatex is not a zero-effort (moving to polyglossia, using fontspec, maybe removing some magic in many-lines private templates, and so on).

For all I know, because I'm always curious and peek at PDF file properties as a hobby (if only to check which cool font that is), basically every scientific paper I read is set using pdftex. luatex usage in the wild is, as far as I perceive it, nil, outside of enthusiast luatex user spheres. I don't think this will change unless texlive drops pdftex (as it still ships ptex and even uptex, it probably won't for a very long time).

[alexpovel]

> basically every scientific paper I read is set using pdftex

That is only because their templates are years behind the curve and they are slow to update. It is not an argument for the advantages of pdftex, aside from its stability, gained over many decades.

LuaTeX has been nothing but stable for me, so from a technical standpoint, there is no reason not to switch.

As far as scientific papers go, the publishers and editors probably value stability and backward-compatibility (I would).

[leephillips]

Officially, luatex is the future. ConTeXt is based on it. I’ve heard that the kinds of problems I’m having are caused by its font-loading routines, and not the core parts of luatex, but without further research that doesn’t really help me.