[XeTeX] "new-babel", was: Ancient Greek hyphenation

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

>> If one uses a UCS-2 
>> encoded input file with Omega with a Unicode encoded font (OK not
>> really Unicode font), then I cannot really think of any reason to use
>> OTPs. Thus, in my opinion, the lessons learned from work on Omega are
>> not really "applicable" here.
>
> Have a look at the original Greek or French language modules for Lambda written
> by Yannis Haralambous, where OCP's are used, for example, to replace
> initial beta with medial beta in the appropriate places or to normalize
> kerning/spacing around punctuation characters.

I am quite aware of this use of OTPs (OCPs are just the binary form of
OTPs), that is, of substituting a character with a variant (see "Digital
Typography Using LaTeX", co-authored by me, for more examples).
However, note that it was almost impossible to have two betas in the world 
of extended ASCIIs and so one had to invent something to solve this problem.
When using Unicode-encoded you can type in directly the characters
you want. And o

>In XeTeX, however, the same effects are achieved either with
>font-specific "smart" features, or with mappings, or, finally, with
>active characters (just like in traditional non-Unicode engines). That's
>why I think XeTeX is much closer to (pdf)tex than Omega or Aleph as far
>as language support packages are concerned.

They are closer by analogy not because they are closer by definition. Also,
I think this TECkit feature of XeTeX allows people to do things quite similar
to OTPs (ok up to a degree).


Apostolos
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*Apostolos Syropoulos                                          *
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