LaTeX

The short answer is that TeX doesn't know how to deal with UTF-8 (or rather non-ASCII) characters. XeTeX has been designed to work around these limitations. The easiest way to generate PDFs is to install Xe(La)TeX and use the 'xedemo' templates - these templates have been 'ported' from LaTeX to XeLaTeX.

Distribution specific install instructions listed below.

Debian / Ubuntu 

Install texlive-xetex that includes xelatex

The templates use the Template Toolkit scripting language to generate actual content.
Depending on the typesetting language, the files use
* HTML;
* (Xe)LaTeX; or
* plain text
as the typesetting system.

While LaTeX and XeLaTeX are extremely similar, some differences exist, mainly in the area of font selection and document preamble.


Latex cheat sheet - http://www.stdout.org/~winston/latex/