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I have been meditating about the three hyphenation variants and the
various language variants concerning Latin (the same approach might
be used with Greek when typesetting with XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX).<br>
<br>
I have written three different language description files that allow
both XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX to handle such variants as independent
languages, so as to be able to use the three of them in the same
document.<br>
<br>
Actually the gloss-latin.ldf handles variant spelling and
hyphenation the same as done with pdfLaTeX, with which things are
different also because it handles only 8-bit encoded glyphs, but it
can be used also to use one variant, say modern, or medieval, and
call classic or liturgical as different lannguages.<br>
<br>
Thesrefore the situation is as such:<br>
1) with pdfLaTeX and Babel things go on their way without involving
XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX.<br>
2) with XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX and polyglossia modern o medieval, and
classic and liturgical can be used as three independent languages.<br>
3) with XeLaTeX only it is possible to use the language description
file gloss-latin.ldf and its variants the same as with pdfLaTeX.<br>
<br>
Therefore by running pdfLaTeX on the attached dtx file you get three
language description files:<br>
gloss-latin.ldf<br>
gloss-classiclatin.ldf<br>
gloss-liturgicallatin.ldf<br>
<br>
and the documentation file gloss-latin.pdf.<br>
<br>
Arthur, if you are not interested in the documentation you can throw
away the pdf file; when things are done you might even chose to
throw away also the .dtx file. But some short parts of the text
contained in this .dtx file may be used to write the subsection
concerning Latin in the polyglossia documentation source file.<br>
<br>
As for what concerns the availability of these .ldf files in the
TeXLive distribution (and therefore in the MiKTeX one), I assume
that everything will be done <b>before</b> the 2017 distribution.<br>
<br>
I will maintain my silence until then; then I will possibly give up
the maintenance of the gloss-*latin.ldf files if my contribution is
ignored. I do not require that it is immediately processed and made
available to the whole "universe" of people needing to write in
Latin. I am nobody; not even a latinist, therefore my contribution
might be of no value for professional latinists. And if things are
such, there is no scope that I keep using my time and my experience
for updating Latin patterns and Latin description files.<br>
<br>
Of course, if before 2017 you or anybody else finds that something
should be changed or corrected, I am still available.<br>
<br>
Apostolos Syropoulos is included as Cc. He might suggest to use a
similar approach for Greek; at the moment the only gloss-greek.ldf
language definition file works correctly only with XeLaTeX. I know
he is not enthusiast of LuaLaTeX, but he might change his mind when
he discovers the typesetting properties of LuaLaTeX, in particular
the full power with microtype, that with XeLaTeX can be used only
for protrusion and not for character expansion. Another feature is
that LuaLaTeX can directly produce PDF/A-compliant long term
archivable documents, while at the moment with XeLaTeX it is
impossible to achieve this goal, unless some tweaking is done (the
problem with XeLaTeX is that its native output is in an extended
form of the DVI format: this file is piped into an extended DVI to
PDF converter, that, on turn, cannot correctly do the job if file
compression is desired, because the PDF/A metadata should not be
compressed).<br>
<br>
All the best<br>
Claudio<br>
<br>
<br>
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