[XeTeX] polyglossia becoming reality...

[François Charette]

Dear all,

Perhaps some of you remember the discussion we had in April of last year 
concerning a babel replacement for XeLaTeX?

Since I had some free hours last month while I was in India I decided to 
start writing the package *polyglossia*! This initial version is based 
on antomega, the idea being that we need something that reliably works 
NOW. Also I do not have enough time and programming talent to develop 
something as ambitious as mem. But I have experimented somewhat more 
with the module for Arabic, so this is nevertheless clearly beyond a 
plain adaptation of antomega for xelatex ;)

polyglossia, as with babel and antomega
1) loads the hyphenation patterns for the current language (currently 
using babel's hyphen.cfg that is built in the xelatex format)
2) defines language-dependent strings
3) provides modules for alphanumerical number notations and for 
calendrical computations. I have written a new package, hijrical, for 
dates in the Islamic calendar.
4) in some cases (e.g. for French) it provides ways to implement 
“typographic conventions” (if possible by means of \XeTeXcharclass and 
\XeTeXinterchartoks).

In addition it also takes care of setting directionality, and informs 
fontspec about script and language settings. This area is still being 
investigated.

polyglossia obviously does not deal with input encodings, font 
encodings, shorthands, ligatures, and the like.

The current development snapshot is available from 
http://ankabut.net/xetex/polyglossia.zip
Just unzip the content to .../tex/xelatex/polyglossia/
There is no documentation right now, but it basically works as with 
antomega. You can also have a look at the included file test.tex. Some 
required *.tec files from ArabXeTeX are also included: they belong to 
.../fonts/misc/xetex/fontmapping/

I insist that the current version is "pre-alpha" quality... I would be 
very happy if many readers of this list could experiment with it and 
make suggestions. My own TODO list is already pretty long. For example I 
don't really like the current language setup mechanism with \background 
and \load ... so advices converning the user interface are welcome.

Best,
François