[XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

Hi Ross and Javier,

there are two aspects. If I take an example of Czech and Slovak, many years
ago DC fonts and EC fonts were not suitable for Czech/Slovak typography,
therefore CS fonts with a different encoding were created. Now LM fonts as
well as TeX Gyre contain everything we need and are even better (only a few
people can really see the divverence between CS and LM). The old IL2
encoding was creased for the CS fonts and supported in cslatex. Jiří
Zlatuška prepared a patch for babel, gave it to me so tah I could extend
and publish it, it was later modified by several persons, the last one was
Petr Tesařík. The problem is that the support of two or more font encodings
requires a modification of the LaTeX kernel but it was not accepted by the
LaTeX team. Our patch was available from my web page but just very few
people really used it. Thus the result is that the only encoding for Czech
and Slovak that has ever been officially supported in babel is T1. It makes
no sense to introduce IL2 (and XL2 that was probably used by me only).

As far as collections of olde texts are concerned, there is no problem of
different font encodings but a problem of different input encodings. If I
take very old Czech/Slovak documents together with the newer ones, I will
kave a collection of files in 5 different encodings. Without reencoding the
files by iconv only encTeX ca cope with it. So we should keep the old
engines for legacy documents but it makes no sense to reproduce the old
input and old fonts in nowaday's engines.

Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz

2016-03-25 4:23 GMT+01:00 Ross Moore <ross.moore at mq.edu.au>:

> Hi Javier,
>
> On Mar 24, 2016, at 5:59 PM, Javier Bezos <jbezosl at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Apostolos,
>
> preface = \textPi \textrho\acctonos \textomicron\textlambda
> \textomicron\textgamma
>
> XeLaTeX is Unicode aware and can handle Unicode strings. Therefore, I fail
> to see
> why you are doing things this way. The LGR font encoding is an ancient
> hack that
> has no usage anymore.
>
>
> Of course, in Unicode engines the default captions section
> apply, not the captions.licr subsection.
>
>
> I think that it is absolutely correct that you build in continuing support
> for old encodings that may no longer be used with new documents.
>
> The existence of old documents using such encodings certainly
> warrants this — especially in the case of archives that process
> old (La)TeX sources to create PDFs on the fly.
>
> It is quite possible that in future these will be required to conform
> to modern standards, rather than just reproduce exactly what those
> sources did in past decades. Then there is the issue of old documents
> being aggregated with newer ones, for “Collected Works”-like publications.
>
> It is quite wrong to say that because we now have newer, better methods
> that those older methods should be discarded entirely.
>
>
> I’m facing exactly this problem, adapting  pdfx.sty  to be able to
> translate
> Metadata provided in old encodings: KOI8-R, LGR, OT6 etc.
> automatically into UTF-8, because the latter is required by XMP for
> requirements to satisfy PDF/A, PDF/X and PDF/E standards.
>
>
>
> Javier
>
>
> Keep up the good work.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ross
>
>
> * Dr Ross Moore*
>
> *Mathematics Dept **|* Level 2, S2.638 AHH
> Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia
>
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