[XeTeX] Polyglossia 1.0.2: babelshorthands broken?

[Alexey Kryukov]

On Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:21:23 +0100
François Charette wrote:
> 
> This is obviously a bug... I hope to fix this asap.

Hi François,

fortunately this particular problem is easy to fix: you have just
to put braces around UTF-8 characters in last 4 \XeTeXinterchartoks
rules. But unfortunately that's not all. If I compile a German document
with shorthands, I am still getting erroneous results: for example,
"` instead of the expected opening quote results into the sequence "„`.
This is because you are attempting to emulate shorthands using the
\XeTeXinterchartoks primitive, which (according to the documentation)
is intended just to insert something between two characters, but not
to remove those characters from the output.

So it seems instead of relying on \XeTeXinterchartoks you
should have used the traditional scheme with active characters: the
corresponding code can probably be just taken from Babel and moved
to polyglossia. I think it would be really important to implement
this, because German is not the only language which uses shorthands.
In particular shorthands are important for Russian typesetting:
although I don't like them myself, there are enough Russian users 
which cannot move to polyglossia (and thus to xelatex) just because
of the lack of this feature.

-- 
Regards,
Alexey Kryukov <anagnost at yandex dot ru>

Moscow State University
Historical Faculty