[XeTeX] XeTeX for Linux (first experiencies)

Pablo Rodríguez oinos at web.de
Tue Jun 6 18:46:17 CEST 2006


Jonathan Kew wrote:
> On 4 Jun 2006, at 11:23 pm, Pablo Rodríguez wrote:
>> XeTeX does not work with babel and polutonikogreek.
> 
> This is to be expected, as Babel-based packages such as  
> polutonikogreek are designed to work with legacy 8-bit encoded text  
> and fonts, and do not interact well with xetex's Unicode support. The  
> Greek package probably goes to  some lengths to control "font  
> encodings" and remap character codes, and thus interferes with the  
> simple pure-Unicode path that is natural in xetex.
> 
> It should work to use polytonic Greek *without* the help of Babel,  
> except that you won't get hyphenation support. What is needed is a  
> Babel-like mechanism to switch hyphenation patterns, and load new  
> "fixed texts" for labels like Figure, Chapter, etc., but without  
> forcing particular legacy font encodings. Someone with a good  
> understanding of Babel could perhaps separate out the functionality  
> we still need, to produce a xetex-compatible "Babel Lite" package,  
> but I haven't looked into this seriously.

If I don't get it wrong, what it would be required at least, after
having rewritten .sty and .ldf files for Greek, Russian, Hebrew (and
maybe others), would be a different language.dat file for XeTeX.

So it would be possible to hyphenate these languages in both LaTeX and
XeLaTeX and it would be possible to hyphenate Irish and Ukranian in LaTeX.

Is that right or am I missing something?

Thanks,


Pablo



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