[XeTeX] Polyglossias babelshorthands (was: mathspec and polyglossia)

[Tobias Schoel]

Hi,

this mail can be seen as a bug report, feature request or question for a 
workaround, depending on who it is asked to and how he sees it.

Polyglossias gloss-russian.ldf calls babelsh.def. The way I understand 
the documentation, babelshorthands are only implemented for German, 
Dutch and Catalan. So here documentation and implementation differ.

Polyglossia with babelshorthands is incompatible with mathspec, which is 
afaik the only possibility to work with arbitrary fonts in xetex math. 
That's why it's important as a user creating documents with mathematics 
to have full control over the activation of babelshorthands: If I need 
mathspec, I have to prevent babelshorthands. If I use unicode-math, then 
I might want babelshorthands.

So how can I prevent polyglossia (or thinking further ahead: any 
package) from loading babelshorthands?

In the minimal example in the referenced thread, commenting out the 
lines in gloss-russian.ldf, which load babelsh.def, worked, but I'm no 
tex-expert to tell, whether this was enough or might cause other 
problems in real examples.

Thanks

Toscho