[XeTeX] polyglossia and french

[rhino64 at postmail.ch]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 09:11:55AM +0200, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> 2011/9/25 Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com>:
> > On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 22:55, Alan Munn wrote:
> >> On Sep 24, 2011, at 3:34 PM, rhino64 at postmail.ch wrote:
> >>
> >>> Hi All,
> >>>    When typesetting documents in french with polyglossia,
> >>> a space is added before double punctuation signs (like !:?...).
> >>>
> >>> This is normal in french typography used in France. However,
> >>> here in Switzerland, it is more usual to not use this
> >>> extra space.
> > /.../
> >> There's a command \nofrench at punctuation which turns off all the French related punctuation.
> > /.../
> >> So to selectively turn off the special spacing for particular characters, redefine this command by commenting out the lines that correspond to spacing that you wish to keep, and then issue the command to turn of the uncommented ones.
> >
> > I don't know anything about French in Switzerland, but if such a usage
> > is common, it makes more sense to add an option to Polyglossia to
> > switch French spacing off with a package option/language-specific
> > setting instead of resorting to low level commands.
> >
> I have received a private mail from François Charette saying that he
> no longer has time to maintain polyglossia and he offered the package
> to others to become maintainers. I myself will not have any time tilll
> the end of this year and moreover do not know git and have no time to
> learn it. If someone is able to clone it, migrate it to subversion (or
> cvs) and become a new maintainer, i will actively join the team of
> developers in January 2012.
> 
Hi All,
     Thanks for replying me with these ideas. I could perhaps
do a part of the work since I will have a certain amount of time
until the end of year.

As far as I know, GIT is not very different from CVS/Subversion
(the joke about Git is that it is the answer to the question:"who is the boss ?").
Where the CVS/Subversion repository should be located ?  For me, the choice of 
a source control system is not a big problem: I can work with all the three.

I think effectively, that an option to the package could be a nice solution,
since it is possible that other differences occur. For instance the wording
could be sometimes different from the french spoken in France
(like the difference between American an British english).

What does imply to add an option "romand" (the french speaking part of
of Switzerland is often called "Romandie") to polyglossia. Should I clone
the Git repository, do the modifications and hope they will be integrated
in the main stream ?


best regards,

Alain