[XeTeX] babel

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Tue Sep 4 10:53:54 CEST 2012


2012/9/4 François Patte <francois.patte at mi.parisdescartes.fr>:
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> Le 03/09/2012 20:16, Zdenek Wagner a écrit :
>> 2012/9/3 Javier Bezos <listas at tex-tipografia.com>:
>>> François,
>>>
>>>
>>>> Some times ago, I read that babel will be compatible with
>>>> xelatex.
>>>>
>>>> I would like to use babel with french and sanskrit languages, do
>>>>  I have any chance to succeed?
>>>
>> Maintainig babel is important for (pdf)latex which is still in use
>> but for XeLaTeX I would suggest polyglossia which already works.
>
> Dear Zednek,
>
> Thank you for all these information about sanskrit (I knew some but
> others are useful). My main problem is French: babel French is really a
> very good help for French typography while French with polyglossia is
> very poor!
>
That's bad news! I thought that François Charette implemented French
in Polyglossia well. What is missing? Maybe it could be implemented
fast. And are there good OpenType fonts for French? I know that French
uses tiny spaces preceding double punctuation. This is a similar case
as in Hindi where some spaces are used in front of question marks and
exclamation marks (I found it i some article written by an Indian
typographer). IMHO it should be a property of a font, not of a
typesetting system. GNU FreeFont already contains such language
features. Probably Steve White would know how to implement
Language=French so that colons, semicolons, question and exclamation
marks had proper French spacing.

> If I could find somewhere a "Rosetta stone" to translate babel French
> into polyglossia French, I certainly try to make this translation!
>
> As for Devanagary script, I don't know FreeSerif fonts, I'll try them. I
> presently use Velthuis fonts with the devnag preprocessor.
>
You would like FreeSerif because its Devanagari block is derived
directly from the Velthuis PFB files.

> Thanks again.
>
> F.P.
>
> - --
> François Patte
> UFR de mathématiques et informatique
> Laboratoire MAP5 --- UMR CNRS 8145
> Université Paris Descartes
> 45, rue des Saints Pères
> F-75270 Paris Cedex 06
> Tél. +33 (0)1 8394 5849
> http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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