XeTeX v. ConText, PGF/TikZ v. Asymptote

[Hypnos]

I have been happily using LaTeX/pdfTeX and beamer for my professional work. However, I'd like to take things to the next level. In particular, I would like the the following capabilities:

1) Floating graphical elements that can be referenced in the document. This is important for making impactful presentations, wherein I can highlight certain text, equations or graphics in a dynamical fashion. (beamer pause/overlays must still follow the canonical TeX document structure)

2) Unicode support, as I speak in front of international audiences and would like to easily add non-Latin text.

It seems that TikZ and XeTeX are suitable for these tasks (pgf and texlive-xetex in Portage), however having never used them I am not sure if (a) they will deliver on these requirements or (b) there are better options, a la ConTeXt and asymptote.

I would appreciate input from others who have more experience using these tools for this purpose.

Thanks!
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[mv]

I am not sure what you mean by (1), but maybe pstricks is what you are looking for. (You must use dvips and ps2pdf to get a pdf; the pst-pdf package might help here).
Concerning (2), I have not much experience, but for most things \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} should be enough. Luatex supports utf8 natively, though for asian languages you might have a problem with available fonts for output. But cyrillic e.g. is not a problem.

[Hypnos]

[mv]