I recently co-authored an article [0] that attempts to explain the various engines and formats.
My personal recommendation would be to just always use "lualatex", or "pdflatex" if you have older documents that won't work with LuaLaTeX for some reason. I'm also a big fan of ConTeXt [2], but I realize that that isn't a practical option for most people.
My personal recommendation would be to just always use "lualatex", or "pdflatex" if you have older documents that won't work with LuaLaTeX for some reason. I'm also a big fan of ConTeXt [2], but I realize that that isn't a practical option for most people.
[0]: https://tug.org/members/TUGboat/tb46-3/tb144berry-engines-fo... [1]
[1]: Paywalled until April, sorry. Email me and I can send you a copy though (this offer is open to anybody).
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47272239