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There are multiple TeX typesetting engines. Both commands (pdflatex and xelatex) generate a PDF. What is the technical/effective/historical/etc. difference between these two commands? I'm using TeX Live.
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Hence, pdflatex , for example, calls the pdfTeX program using the standard LaTeX macros to typeset LaTeX documents, whereas it is the default rendering engine for ConTeXt documents.
LuaTeX, like XeTeX, is a Unicode engine and is capable of loading system fonts. In contrast to XeTeX, the latter ability is not “built-in” to the engine itself, but is added using Lua code. This possibility to modify the behaviour of the engine at the “user” end makes it particularly powerful.
microtype is indeed slower with luatex than with pdftex . This is mostly because of certain operations that have to be applied to all glyphs in the font (and Opentype fonts can be huge!), These loops are carried out in tex while it would be much faster using luatex techniques.
XeTeX is a typesetting engine derived from Donald Knuth's original TeX software.
First things first, the difference between pdfTeX and pdfLaTeX is the same as the difference between TeX and LaTeX described above, it is the same binary with a different format file. The difference between TeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, luaTeX is that they are different versions of the fundamental TeX executable.
PDFLaTeX is faster than XeLaTeX as you've noticed. It also currently has better support for certain advanced microtypographic features. (Margin kerning and the like.)
If you have no need of those features, then I'd stick with PDFLaTeX. PDFLaTeX is faster than XeLaTeX as you've noticed. It also currently has better support for certain advanced microtypographic features. (Margin kerning and the like.) And if you really want to confuse yourself, you could also be considering LuaLaTeX at this point too.
What we refer to today as LaTeX or TeX is in fact pdfTeX running in DVI mode, in which case these DVI files must then be converted to PDF with an external tool. XeTeX: a separate development of e-TeX with support for modern (i.e. TTF) fonts and with native Unicode character set support.
PdfTeX and XeTeX and the equivalent commands for latex are two implementations for the same purpose, as you have pointed out already. The Wikipedia articles have more details on the history and development.
One of the main differences from an operational point of view is that XeTeX has better support for fonts -- in particular you can use system fonts instead of only TeX fonts. It also has better support for non-latin character encodings.
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