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

[Javier Bezos]

> font features and other things can be optionally specified for the
> various languages or scripts to be used in the document. In such a
> situation font switching would only occur if the user has explicitly
> asked for it in the preamble. Those ideas are in fact quite similar (if
> I recall correctly) to the implementation in Mem.

In Mem, languages and scripts set default encondings (with
\SetScriptEncodings), but it never sets the font family,
except, as you said, if explicitly given in the document
in \scriptproperties or \languageproperties. So, if the current
encoding is T1 and the family is cmr, and we switch to, say,
Greek, then Mem shall see if there exists LGR+cmr (this part
is not yet implemented in full, but the basics are already
there). Very likely, LaTeX3 shall work more or less in the
same way.

> A little digression: We should be wary indeed of the fact that not a few
> non-European languages can be written in several scripts, 

And European -- don't forget Spanish (Latin and Hebrew scripts).

Javier