XeTeX - Old Content
About XeTeX
XeTeX is a new TeX engine by Jonathan Kew and SIL International, which combines eTeX with pervasive Unicode support and advanced font support (multiple language, special AAT and OpenType font features, trivial font installation). It does this by leveraging Apple Advanced Typography support on MacOSX, so it gains its strength in features by sacrificing TeX's usual cross-platformness, and some backwards compatibility.
XeTeX and ConTeXt
XeTeX is a potential replacement for pdfeTeX in the ConTeXt workflow. It does not support all of the fancy PDF features found with pdfeTeX, but it supports most core features (see #Limitations on this page). Common consensus is that for text with non-heavy mathematics needs, XeTeX should be an interesting alternative.
Installing XeTeX
The best and easiest way of installing XeTeX on MacOSX is by using Gerben Wierda's i-Installer. After XeTeX being installed and ConTeXt being updated, you should make a format with texexec:
texexec --make --xtx en
This will generate cont-en.xfmt, which will be used when running XeTeX and ConTeXt.
Running XeTeX
XeTeX is invoked with the --xtx switch in texexec