[lltx] German Hypenation broken in LuaLaTeX for TL2010

[François Charette]

  On 15/07/2010 13:30, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:
> Le 15/07/2010 13:21, Elie Roux a écrit :
>> ulrik.vieth at arcor.de a écrit :
>>> Sorry, I didn't know I was supposed to use Babel with (Lua|Xe)LaTeX.
>> actually you are supposed to use Babel with pdfLaTeX and LuaLaTeX, and
>> polyglossia with XeTeX.
>>
> Well, I've successfully produced quite a few documents with XeTeX and babel, so
> I'd say you're supposed to use:
> - babel with pdfLaTeX ;
> - babel or polyglossia with XeLaTeX, since both are basically working and
> neither of them is a clear superset of the other ;
> - babel for now with LuaLaTeX, but hopefully polyglossia will be an option soon.
>
> Manuel.
>

I concur with Manuel on each point. But as Ulrike remarked, Babel works fine under XeLaTeX 
as long as one deals with Western languages in Latin script. For such situations Babel has 
also the advantage of being (presumably) more stable than polyglossia. On the other hand, 
the latter now supports nearly 70 different languages, including "exotic" ones such as 
Syriac, Urdu, Lao and Malayalam. XeLaTeX/polyglossia is now becoming increasingly popular 
with speakers of languages using non-Latin scripts, as well as with scholars who deal with 
such languages. For them Babel is simply not an option... ;)

Concerning support for LuaLaTeX: this is something I am indeed seriously considering for a 
later version (I am about to release v1.2.0 to CTAN in the next hours). I have discussed 
this with Elie in the past, and now that fontspec and bidi support both engines, the only 
remaining issue to solve, besides that of hyphenation patterns, is the one Elie mentioned 
with \XeTeXinterchartokens, which is currently used for French, Breton, Turkish and 
Sanskrit. Otherwise support for LuaLaTeX should be pretty straightforward.

If any of you wants to contribute, please do! Polyglossia is not my property. Just clone 
the github repo, create a lualatex branch, and send a pull request. I can also register 
any of you as official collaborator, if you wish.

Regards,
François