[XeTeX] Announcement: POLYGLOSSIA v1.0

[François Charette]

Dear XeTeX users,

I have just uploaded the initial release (v1.0) of the package 
polyglossia to CTAN.

The impatient ones can already read the documentation here:
http://scripts.sil.org/svn-view/xetex/TRUNK/texmf/doc/xelatex/polyglossia/polyglossia.pdf

This is the README file that comes with the package:

===README.txt===

THE POLYGLOSSIA PACKAGE v1.0

Modern multilingual typesetting with XeLaTeX


This package for provides a complete Babel replacement for users of XeLaTeX.
The initial version includes support for 54 different languages.

Polyglossia makes it possible to automate the following tasks:

* Loading the appropriate hyphenation patterns.
* Setting the script and language tags of the current font (if possible and
available), using the package fontspec.
* Switching to a font assigned by the user to a particular script or 
language.
* Adjusting some typographical conventions in function of the current 
language
(such as afterindent, frenchindent, spaces before or after punctuation 
marks,
etc.).
* redefining the document strings (like “chapter”, “figure”, 
“bibliography”).
* Adapting the formatting of dates (for non-gregorian calendars via external
packages bundled with polyglossia: currently the hebrew, islamic and farsi
calendars are supported).
* For languages that have their own numeration system, modifyinf the 
formatting
of numbers appropriately.
* Ensuring the proper directionality if the document contains languages
written from right to left (via the package bidi, available separately).

Several features of Babel that do not make sense in the XeTeX world 
(like font
encodings, shorthands, etc) are not supported.

Polyglossia is distributed in the traditional way with *.dtx and *.ins 
files,
and also comes with a TDS-conformant ready-to-unpack zip file.

To install from source (i.e. using polyglossia.dtx), run
xelatex polyglossia.dtx
which will generate all files and produce the pdf documentation all at 
once.
Alternatively if you have the file polyglossia.ins run
xetex polyglossia.ins
and follow the instructions displayed.

===END OF README.txt===

I have also updated the package bidi to version 0.3, which adds support
for tabular environments and captions (among other things).

Enjoy!

François Charette