[XeTeX] XeLaTex and Armenian

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

> But don't you still need markup (perhaps implicit using  interchartoks) to 
>switch 
>
>hyphenation routines (or different spacings or  whatever) for the different 
>languages? Then 
>
>it doesn't matter if you  need to  switch font features or not since other 
>things are happening  anyway.

Good point, but when one prepares a multilingual document, it is important to 
produce something
that looks homogeneous (or at least that's the word I would use in Greek).  
Recently,
an Italian friend published his PhD dissertation. His work was about a Greek 
engineer that
lived in the Roman times. Naturally, the text has many Greek passages while the 
main language
of the text is Italian. He used XeLaTeX to prepare his text and of course it was 
a natural
choice for him and his publisher to use the same font for both Greek and 
Italian. As for
the hyphenation, we did a trick: he used only the Italian rules which were 
"augmented" with
the Greek ones. This was a quick hack, but he did not want to try "tricks". In 
addition, all Greeks
who write bilingual or multilingual texts, always use the same fonts. Finally, 
the people who
wrote an armenian LaTeX package (it is documented in our "Digital Typography 
Using LaTeX"),
have created Armenian fonts using Knuth's fonts as a basis for the reason 
explained above.
So in practice, people do not change fonts between scripts. If this does not 
apply to Arabic or
Hebrew, is something I do not know.

Regards,
A.S.


----------------------
Apostolos Syropoulos
Xanthi, Greece