>> Undoubtably a change this severe will be painful for some, but it will be less less painful than heading out to the computer shop in 3 years time to purchase the 2TB harddrive that will be required for the exponentially expanding tex updates.
Few arguments ever gain feasibility from hyperbole, this article is not an exception. The size of his texlive installation is purely circumstantial evidence, since that folder also includes backups of updated packages and all sorts of other "dynamic", i.e. user-specific data. Basing the argument on that seems...silly.
>> For those for whom adding the letters xe before typesetting is too much to bear, or for typesetting ancient documents
It isn't as easy as "just adding xe" before (La)TeX, since not all packages are integrated with it yet, and since the polyglossia package is still not fully stable, either (yes I know babel is old, but at least stable), so some packages have trouble dealing with polyglossia or have experimental interfaces in order to work with Xe(La)TeX. Csquotes is one of the packages that comes to mind.
A further problem with XeTeX is that it still does not offer a proper version of the microtype package. And on top of everything, the hyperref-support for colours is spotty at times, at least for me.
For me, depending on situation, pdflatex and xelatex live happily next to each other and are both included in the same in my generic template via the ifxetex package and \ifxetex...\else...\fi, so depending on what I need in a given instance, running either binary on the same file produces either output.
Few arguments ever gain feasibility from hyperbole, this article is not an exception. The size of his texlive installation is purely circumstantial evidence, since that folder also includes backups of updated packages and all sorts of other "dynamic", i.e. user-specific data. Basing the argument on that seems...silly.
>> For those for whom adding the letters xe before typesetting is too much to bear, or for typesetting ancient documents
It isn't as easy as "just adding xe" before (La)TeX, since not all packages are integrated with it yet, and since the polyglossia package is still not fully stable, either (yes I know babel is old, but at least stable), so some packages have trouble dealing with polyglossia or have experimental interfaces in order to work with Xe(La)TeX. Csquotes is one of the packages that comes to mind. A further problem with XeTeX is that it still does not offer a proper version of the microtype package. And on top of everything, the hyperref-support for colours is spotty at times, at least for me.
For me, depending on situation, pdflatex and xelatex live happily next to each other and are both included in the same in my generic template via the ifxetex package and \ifxetex...\else...\fi, so depending on what I need in a given instance, running either binary on the same file produces either output.