[XeTeX] Conflict between xunicode and fontspec?

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 6 févr. 08 à 20:49, Julien ÉLIE a écrit :

> I have a question:  why should polyglossia be written from scratch?
> Couldn't Babel be "updated" to be used with XeLaTeX?
>
> I think it is a waste of time and effort to write polyglossia instead
> of improving what Babel does.  Is is really incompatible with no
> way to make it work with XeLaTeX?

As François Charette already answered, there have been a number of  
threads on this.

Babel does several disconnected things regarding language support:

- Select hyphenation files.

- Translate strings (like "section", "chapter", "carbon copy", etc.).

- Implement language-specific typographic conventions.

- Select specific fonts (for Russian, for Greek, ...) and specific  
encodings.

Some of these things are incompatible with XeTeX (font and encoding  
selection), and others are not agreed upon by all users.

Taking French as an example, the French babel definition file not only  
sets spacing properly around punctuation (normal space after ".",  
space before ":" and ";", etc.) and adds support for guillemets, but  
it also enforces assumed norms (like only dashes before items in  
itemized lists and no space between items, surnames in small caps,  
etc.) which to my knowledge are no norms at all and which I personally  
consider bad taste.

Similarly, just yesterday or the day before there was a question here  
or on the OS X TeX list on how to prevent the Spanish definition file  
from replacing "." in digits in maths by ",".

There are switches, language by language, to prevent Babel from taking  
these initiatives, but these switches are often undocumented and their  
syntax vary greatly from one language to the other.

Because of all this, the general opinion here (my interpretation,  
obviously) was that it would be better if these distinct functions of  
Babel were independent from each other, and could be activated at will  
by the user. For example, I'm personally interested in hyphenation  
selection and translation of strings, and on a small subset of  
language-specific typographic conventions, but in none of the other  
initiatives Babel is taking.

Given it's rather unlikely that Babel is modified to make its  
functions independent (that would probably require a reimplementation  
from scratch, given Babel's foundation on 8-bit fonts and encodings),  
it was suggested that a new package is created, based on Unicode and  
oriented towards XeTeX support (and possibly LuaTeX at some point).

Then François Charette took upon himself to create this package, and  
the rest is history... ;-)

Bruno Voisin