xetex

XeTeX and xelatex indeed do support all the wondrous diacritics and Klingon symbols of unicode fonts (TTF or OTF, no less).

Most distributions also ship xelatex, which is the LaTeX compiler of the XeTeX project.

My first reaction is: This would be really cool if I hadn't already invested the effort to learn LaTeX/XeTeX.

If you want Unicode, you need to use a separate project called XeTeX.

Similarly, I've had nice results combining Zapf Renaissance Antiqua text (via XeTeX fontspec) with Palatino maths and Optima headings.

Use Xetex or Luatex, and standardise everything on Unicode; these problems go away.

All major implementations (miktex, pdftex, xetex, luatex) are derivatives of Knuth's Pascal code.

In case you want to change your mind XeTeX is now optional.

Or XeTeX for that matter, even though I suspect LuaTeX may very well be the future.

If you do end up going with LaTeX, I would highly recommend XeTeX/XeLaTeX so you have a larger font selection.

My guess is that he is building the PDFs through latex/xetex.

The modern TeXs (xetex, luatex) take unicode input.

XeTeX's home page [1] introduces it as "Unicode-based TeX".

Did I mention that XeTeX does not “skip the DVI step” at all, but it actually does fork an external binary to convert its ‘extended’ DVI into PDF.

There have been a number of important packages that run on top of TeX, for example LaTeX and ConText and even enhanced implementations of TeX itself, like LuaTeX, pdftex, and xetex; however, only Knuth's TeX can be called "TeX".

Xetex is a rewrite that supports Unicode and TTF/OTF fonts.