[kadingira] Babel status

[Javier Bezos]

I reproduce here some chunks (relevant to this list) from a little
conversation with Joseph Wright (private, but his permission).

===================

JW:
 >> - The bidi model in pdfTeX/XeTeX simply doesn't work. I know it's
 >>    extreme, but I'd say no further work should be done on bidi in
 >>    these engines.

JB:
 > I'm tempted, to be honest. But I can't say «OK, babel supports
 > luatex, but neither pdftex nor xetex». At last, I think I've
 > found a very basic support for short text chunks (in the body,
 > but forget about footnotes, headlines, and of course tables,
 > because \halign doesn't support directly bidi writing). And at
 > least babel should provide some bidi support, even if minimal
 > and only for running text (eg, to avoid reversing the words
 > in a short English text in Arabic).

JW:
Understand entirely. There's been basic bidi support in various forms
for a long time in pdfTeX/XeTeX, of course. What I guess I mean is that
for new work I couldn't recommend using them (there is an issue in that
XeTeX is best for some languages). So I'd do what is *required now* but
no more.

========================

JB:
 > Even if the development of luatex is somewhat erratic and
 > sometimes annoying, I think it's the way to go, and in fact
 > it's the engine I'm currently using on a regular basis.

JW:
Broadly agree, and if we could get HarfBuzz properly into LuaTeX I'd go
with it. The fact Hans wants to write a separate font shaper is a real
issue.

JB:
 > But the way, I must redefine \selectfont (even with luatex).
 > I don't like the idea, but it's necessary to make sure the
 > writing direction is correct. Maybe a better place would
 > be fontspec (perhaps hardcoded or, better, with a hook). I
 > must contact Will and Khaled, but this is the kind of things
 > I'd like to discuss on "kadingira".

--------------------------

JB: The issue is he refuses to integrate HarfBuzz, but I share
his preference for a separate font shaper based on lua.
Since I've access to the font internals I've could fix
and hack some fonts. The point is, why not both?

========================

Javier