[XeTeX] xetex+babel, was: missing everything

[Martin Henning]

Hi Jonathan,

On Jan 19, 2006, at 2:32 AM, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> Probably the Babel Russian support, in some way.

yes...

> No, xetex doesn't need (or want) inputenc to try and interpret  
> utf8, it handles that natively.
>
>> or is the fontenc missing? hmmm...
>
> yes, it's font encodings that are getting in the way here, that  
> shows in the LaTeX font warnings.
> If you *don't* load Babel's Russian option, I'd expect that you can  
> put Russian text in a (UTF-8 encoded) input document and it'll  
> simply work, using fonts such as Lucida Grande or Charis SIL. The  
> main things you'll be missing are the proper hyphenation, and the  
> Russian versions of LaTeX-generated text such as "Theorem" or  
> "Figure" or "Chapter". The question is how to get access to that,  
> *without* Babel trying to take over the font encoding and map  
> everything back to some legacy 8-bit Russian font encoding that  
> won't work with Unicode-compliant fonts.

right, but that's exactly why i wanted babel :) i looked into the  
babel.pdf (it's the .dtx i think) for the encodings... if nothing is  
specified, babel looks for available encodings and at last just  
setttles with some default. the list of encodings to choose from does  
not include anything like "U", but the last entry is "T2A", which, it  
seems to me, gets choosen by default if nothing else known. so i'm  
thinking of 'simply' making a copy the the babel-package, rename it  
to xebabel or something, and take out the encoding part. or, add as  
last default "our" encoding - you say "U"? might be just the matter  
of adding one line to the babel-package... what do you think?

> It's getting late here too; maybe I can look at this tomorrow. But  
> I'm not a LaTeX/Babel expert.

though it seems to me the babel-package is very important for many  
people... i guess people using xetex don't use it that much? how do  
they get localized hyphenation and correct names for date/chapter/ 
introduction/blah? only the russian part with the weird encodings?  
can't be like that... so many other easter-european languages where  
babel does the same thing! :) maybe as of now xetex is rather being  
used to generate the really fancy (for eurpean/american/... eyes at  
least) stuff such as arabic etc...

i got up at 9 after going to bed at 4, but my russian teacher seems  
to sleep longer today... so i went back without lessons. will go to  
bed again ;)

.martin


--
Martin Henning
martin at easy2design.de
http://log.tigerbus.de