[XeTeX] Ugly output with ngerman when using quotation marks

Ross Moore ross at ics.mq.edu.au
Mon Feb 7 03:02:55 CET 2005


Hi Jonathan, and Julius,

On 07/02/2005, at 8:25 AM, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> On 5 Feb 2005, at 5:32 pm, dschuli at gmx.net wrote:
>
>> Hello fellows,
>> I use babels ngerman package with xelatex. When quotation marks occur 
>> in the document characters near those quotation marks are lost or 
>> don't display correctly. Please refer to the attachment for sample 
>> files. I use fontspec and utf8accents.sty.
>> The problem does not occur with \usepackage[french]{babel}.
>> I'm sure you can help me and I thank you deeply for that.
>> With kind regards,
>>
>> Julius
>>
>
> I know very little about LaTeX, and even less about the Babel system, 
> but here's my guess: I suspect that the ngerman option is defining the 
> quotation marks in a way that is incompatible with the Unicode font 
> system XeTeX uses.

Yes.  Babel activates " for both 'german' and 'ngerman'...

> It presumably maps the quotes in your source to the appropriate 
> characters in various legacy TeX font

  ... so that you can write:  f"ur  instead of  f\"ur ,
and a few other things.

> encodings, but perhaps utf8accents.sty (which redefines many such 
> LaTeX control sequences for accents and other special characters) 
> doesn't handle these particular ones.
>
> Maybe Ross (who wrote utf8accents) or one of the other LaTeX experts 
> here can throw some light on this?

No, I didn't build in provision for this within  utf8accents.sty .

It shouldn't be too hard to do.
Other Babel languages can activate other characters too.
If there's really a need, then it's something to look at.

Send some examples, to remind me that this work needs to be done!


Cheers,

	Ross


> JK
>
> _______________________________________________
> XeTeX mailing list
> postmaster at tug.org
> http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ross Moore                                         ross at maths.mq.edu.au
Mathematics Department                             office: E7A-419
Macquarie University                               tel: +61 +2 9850 8955
Sydney, Australia                                  fax: +61 +2 9850 8114
------------------------------------------------------------------------



More information about the XeTeX mailing list