[XeTeX] Babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/5/4 John Was <john.was at ntlworld.com>:
> Well that gives me a lot more technical information than I had before, but
> as an end user I don't think I need to manipulate things too much.  To use
> my \latin macro, for example, all I have done is add a line to the file
> header:
>
> \def\latin{\uselanguage{latin}\righthyphenmin=3}
>
> And so on for other languages.  (Never US English though - perisca il
> pensiero!)
>
> I haven't got involved in microtypographical features and don't *think* I
> ever require them (I'm open to correction!).  They seem to involve dynamic
> expansion and compression of a font within the body of a paragraph (is that
> right?) without manual intervention by the user.  Since I was brought up in
> a hot-metal typographical tradition, I absorbed with my mother's milk the
> notion that a font was an artistic creation that shouldn't be interfered
> with, so this all looks very suspicious to me, at least in the kind of work
> that I do (I'm sure it has its uses).  That said, I can remember compositors
> getting out a knife to cut the right-hand edge off a Van Dyck italic V or W
> if it happened to fall at the end of a line and created a crooked effect;
> these highly talented gentlemen would also keep a stock of emtpy cigarette
> boxes and even the foil packaging of the cigarettes so that the right-hand
> column of two-column footnotes could always be feathered to end up at the
> bottom of the page depth even if the column was naturally a line shorter
> than its left-hand neighbour...
>
> I see I've fallen into a nostalgic reverie...
>
Even Gutenberg had some alternate glyphs with different width, for
instance m. Of course, most text do not need automatic
compression/expansion, maybe you will never need it in your life but
there are cases where it is useful.
>
> John
>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Zdenek Wagner" <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>
> To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
> Sent: 04 May 2012 16:11
> Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Babel
>
>
>
> 2012/5/4 John Was <john.was at ntlworld.com>:
>>
>> I'm not going to get involved in the polemics of this thread (which, as
>> has
>> been well pointed out, has tended towards the puerile), but I am a user of
>> (so-called plain) XeTeX, so far without any strong incentive to move over
>> to
>> a LaTeX flavour of the program, and I do appreciate having the hyphenation
>> algorithms immediately accessible so that I just need to type \latin,
>> \greek, \russian, \irish or whatever to ensure good word-breaks (I despair
>> of finding an English one which suits my preference for the old Hart's
>> Rules
>> conventions, so I have a rather gigantic exception \hyphenation list,
>> which
>> one day will no doubt hit the program's maximum).  In the early days of my
>> transfer to XeTeX, I think someone said that these algorithms were
>> supplied
>> to XeTeX by Babel, so I very much hope that it does continue to be a
>> feature
>> of plain XeTeX at least, and don't see why anyone would want to prevent a
>> member of the TeX community from enhancing and maintaining it if that's
>> how
>> the person wants to spend his time.  XeLaTeX users have a choice of
>> alternatives, and polyglossia is clearly of enormous use in some contexts
>> -
>> I would happily learn it if a project came my way that would be difficult
>> to
>> realize without it.  But until then, I'm very happy with what's on offer
>> in
>> XeTeX, and I deplore the suggestion that modules should be abandoned,
>> banned, etc. - especially when couched in the unpleasant terms that I've
>> been reading in these emails.
>>
> Hyphenation algorithm is the integral part of the TeX engine. If you
> want to switch to another language, you have to assign a proper value
> to the \language register, set values of \lefthyphenmin and
> \righthyphenmin and if non-english characters are set on the old
> (La)TeX, you should also set \catcote, \lccode and \uccode of these
> characters. Babel came with user friendly interface that allowed to
> specify the language using a macro that is portable across
> installations (US English is always \language 0 but if I install
> Czech, Slovak and Hindi, in my TeX Hindi will be \language 3 while if
> other person has Hindi, Sanskrit and Urdu, Hindi will be \language 1
> but \hindi will do the same on both computers). Polyglossia is based
> upon the same idea so that both packages can coexist in the same TeX
> distributions, users may use both in XeLaTeX documents and the syntax
> is very similar so that conversion of babel-based documents to
> polyglossia-based ones is quite easy. What is not easy is emulation of
> microtypographical features in XeTeX. Such emulation was described
> before pdfTeX existed and PK fonts were used. It was based upon a perl
> script that analysed the log file, then decided which lines should be
> typeset with expanded or compressed fonts, modified the tfm files and
> the source files, and if the paragraphs were optimized, created the
> expanded and compressed fonts. It would be slightly easier in XeTeX
> because font expansion can be given as a option in \fontspec (if I
> remember the manual well) but still it is not as easy as in pdftex.
>
> If you need anything else than US English and you consider Babel dead
> and unusable, you can only use XeLaTeX+Polyglossia, you cannot even
> use Luatex. Lua as a scripting languages offers to solve certain
> problems in a better and easier way than it is done in nowadays Babel,
> bu there is a question: should it be done in Babel, or in Polyglossia?
> I think there is only one person who has the right to vote: the person
> who volunteers to do it.
>
>> John
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>
>> From: Juan Francisco Fraile Vicente
>> To: Apostolos Syropoulos ; Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other
>> platforms
>> Sent: 04 May 2012 15:19
>> Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Babel
>>
>> Although I don't use babel nowadays, I would like to thank to Javier Bezos
>> his effort and time in maintaining and improving it.
>> That's one of the best things of the *TeX world, that you have options to
>> choose what it is better for you. Perhaps XeTeX is great for some of us
>> today; perhaps tomorrow again LaTeX+babel, LuaTeX or whatever.
>> Keith J Schultz said it better, but I agree with him.
>>
>> Let's see what Javier and others can do.
>>
>> My congrats again, Javier.
>>
>> -------------------------------------------
>> Juan Francisco Fraile Vicente
>> -------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos <asyropoulos at yahoo.com>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> >
>>> > Well, when you compare a LaTeX package to a TeX engine you either don't
>>> > know what you are talking about or deliberately committing a logical
>>> > fallacy, pick your choice.
>>>
>>>
>>> Do you think I don't know the difference between a typesetting engine
>>> and a package? When I talk about babel I mean obviously LaTeX and the
>>> package and when I talk about XeTeX I obviously mean XeLaTeX and some
>>> package.
>>>
>>> A.S.
>>>
>>>
>>> ----------------------
>>> Apostolos Syropoulos
>>> Xanthi, Greece
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Zdeněk Wagner
> http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
> http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz