Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2016-03-25 12:38 GMT+01:00 Javier Bezos :

> El 25/03/2016 10:40, Zdenek Wagner escribió:
>
> The old IL2 encoding was creased for the CS fonts and supported in
>> cslatex. [...] 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).
>>
>
> Then perhaps there should be a further key, like for example:
>
> encodings.deprecated
>

In case of IL2 it is not even deprecated but never supported.

>
> This will open the question about which encodings are deprecated.
> For example, I think like Apostolos LGR should be one of them,
> particularly because it doesn't conform to the LICR, but I presume
> some others won't agree.
>
> Javier
>
>
>
>
> Zdeněk Wagner
> http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
> http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Javier Bezos]

El 25/03/2016 10:40, Zdenek Wagner escribió:


The old IL2 encoding was creased for the CS fonts and supported in
cslatex. [...] 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).


Then perhaps there should be a further key, like for example:

encodings.deprecated

This will open the question about which encodings are deprecated.
For example, I think like Apostolos LGR should be one of them,
particularly because it doesn't conform to the LICR, but I presume
some others won't agree.

Javier






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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2016-03-25 10:39 GMT+01:00 Apostolos Syropoulos :

>
>
> >
> >Why to stop it? I just feel easier to have one common source for
> everything than maintaining a separate source for 8-bit
> >babel, for babel for XeTeX, for babel for luatex etc.
> >
>
> Currently, there are more than 500 binaries in the TeXLive distribution.
> There is a reason for all these binaries.
> However, this makes things very complex and there is no reason to add
> complexity.
>

IMO one common source instead of three separate sources reduces complexity.
If you have several babels and you wish to correct something, you have to
apply the same correction manually several times, the same way in all
relevant files. If you have a single source, you do it just once and
everything will be built automatically.

>
> A.S.
>
>  --
> Apostolos Syropoulos
> Xanthi, Greece
>



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


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Re: [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 :

> Hi Javier,
>
> On Mar 24, 2016, at 5:59 PM, Javier Bezos  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
>
> *T:* +61 2 9850 *8955  |  F:* +61 2 9850 8114 <%2B61%202%209850%209695>
> *M:*+61 407 288 255 <%2B61%20409%20125%20670>*  |  *E:
> ross.mo...@mq.edu.au 
>
> http://www.maths.mq.edu.au 
>
>
> 
>
>
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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

>
>IMO the reason for such activity is to have one common declaration for all 
>engines so that everything 

>is defined at one place and 8-bit babel as well as that for XeTeX is generated 
>from the same source.
>

OK then let's stop compiling and distributing TeX, dvips, etc.! The approach: 
one tool for everything is
wrong, wrong! Although I rarely use Office suites, there are things that one 
can definitely do with
a scripting language and LaTeX but it is far easier to use a spreadsheet. I am 
not against Javier's
project I am just saying this is something the people who maintain babel should 
discuss.


A.S.

--Apostolos Syropoulos
Xanthi, Greece


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

Hi all,

IMO the reason for such activity is to have one common declaration for all
engines so that everything is defined at one place and 8-bit babel as well
as that for XeTeX is generated from the same source.

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

2016-03-25 10:13 GMT+01:00 Apostolos Syropoulos :

>
>
> >
> >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.
> >
>
> Personally, I think this is an absolutely wrong approach! For legacy
> documents,
> we have legacy enginees like TeX. More specifically, if one wants to use
> legacy
>
> 8-bit or 7-bit encodings and legacy fonts, then she can use TeX. There is
> absolutely
> no reason to use XeTeX! After all, this the reason why the TeX community
> includes
> in TeXLive things like dvips, METAFONT fonts, etc. Finally, XeLaTeX can
> process
> these documents with existing packages just fine, why bother rewriting old
> things
> with "modern" ink?
>
>
> Apostolos Syropoulos
>
>
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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Ross Moore]

Hi Javier,

On Mar 24, 2016, at 5:59 PM, Javier Bezos 
> 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

T: +61 2 9850 8955  |  F: +61 2 9850 8114
M:+61 407 288 255  |  E: 
ross.mo...@mq.edu.au

http://www.maths.mq.edu.au


[cid:image001.png@01D030BE.D37A46F0]


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Javier Bezos]

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.

Javier


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Javier Bezos]

Mojca,

Thank you. See me reply to Zdeněk.


What is the difference between months.format.wide and
months.stand-alone.wide?


In most languages, none. This distinction is made by the CLDR,
but I wonder if it's useful here, so very likely the format
branch should be removed.


In Slovenian one sometimes uses the genetive
form of the date, like
 Today is "24. marec 2016" (nominativ)
 This happened on "24. marca 2016" (genetiv)
I don't know whether there is any sane way to encode this though.


From the babel manual:

‘More interesting are differences in the sentence structure or related
to it. For example, in Basque the number precedes the name (including 
chapters), in Hungarian “from (1)” is “(1)-b˝ol”, but “from (3)” is 
“(3)-ból”, in Spanish an item labelled “3.o” may be referred to as

either “ítem 3.o” or “3.er ítem”, and so on.’

So, yes :-).

Javier




I don't know how months.format.narrow is used, but a single letter is
completely useless because it's too ambiguous. One uses 24.3.2016 or
24.03.2016 (in tables etc. where aligning is important). Whether or
not there is space in date.short is debatable. (Officially it's
correct to use space, but almost nobody uses it.) Officially one is
also supposed to write time with a dot rather than colon, but most use
a colon.

German typography doesn't use French spacing as far as I know.

For Slovenian:
- OT1 and LY1 are not suitable encondings.
- Glossary is not a slovenian word. It should probably be "Slovar"
- headto = Prejme is weird
- righthyphenmin = 2
- I don't understand the zillion entries about hyphenchar, but it must
be similar to other European languages.
- Having just "quotes =" might not be sufficient if you want to
automatically support quotes one day like ConTeXt does with
\quote{...} and \quotation{...}. We use two flavours (one can decide
to use either one or the other) and in both flavours one has both
single and double quotes.
   (a) ›single‹ »double«
   (b) ‚single‘ „double“
- What is meant with "exponential = e"? (I use $2{,}1\cdot 10^{-5}$ or
perhaps \times instead of \cdot.) Isn't "e" just a convention for
entering numbers into computers that has absolutely nothing to do with
typography?

I'm not sure if it's correct to use "po n. št." or just "n. št." (at
some point you will probably have to introduce comments in those ini
files). But we don't have BCE. So you might want to use something like
this (I don't want to certify correctness):

eras.abbreviated.0-alt-variant = pr. Kr.
eras.abbreviated.0 = pr. n. št.
eras.abbreviated.1 = po n. št.
eras.abbreviated.1-alt-variant = po Kr.
eras.wide.0-alt-variant = pred Kristusom
eras.wide.0 = pred našim štetjem
eras.wide.1 = našega štetja % or "po našem štetju"
eras.wide.1-alt-variant = po Kristusu
eras.narrow.0-alt-variant = pr. Kr.
eras.narrow.0 = pr. n. št.
eras.narrow.1 = po n. št.
eras.narrow.1-alt-variant = po Kr.

The following is useless (= nobody will understand):

dayPeriods.format.narrow.am = d
dayPeriods.format.narrow.noon = n
dayPeriods.format.narrow.pm = p

We use numbers 0-23 to denote hour of the day rather than some bogus "d/n/p".

Mojca



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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 23 March 2016 at 19:31, Javier Bezos  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm working on a new version of babel, with a new way to define
> languages in a descriptive way, more than in a programmatic one (of
> course, the latter won't be excluded because it's still necessary).
>
> The idea is to create a set of ini file like those you can find on
>
> https://latex-project.org/svnroot/latex2e-public/trunk/required/babel/locales/
>
> They are tentative and some of them are incomplete. I'm working on the
> code to read and 'transform' their data, but in the meanwhile I'd like
> to improve the ini files. The first step in the roadmap is to provide
> real utf-8 strings for captions and dates with current styles so
> that they can be useable even without fontenc.
>
> Any help or comments would be greatly appreciated.

The alphabetic order here is completely confusing:

days.format.wide.fri =
days.format.wide.mon =
days.format.wide.sat =
days.format.wide.sun =
days.format.wide.thu =
days.format.wide.tue =
days.format.wide.wed =

What is the difference between captions and captions.licr?

What is the difference between months.format.wide and
months.stand-alone.wide? In Slovenian one sometimes uses the genetive
form of the date, like
Today is "24. marec 2016" (nominativ)
This happened on "24. marca 2016" (genetiv)
I don't know whether there is any sane way to encode this though.

I don't know how months.format.narrow is used, but a single letter is
completely useless because it's too ambiguous. One uses 24.3.2016 or
24.03.2016 (in tables etc. where aligning is important). Whether or
not there is space in date.short is debatable. (Officially it's
correct to use space, but almost nobody uses it.) Officially one is
also supposed to write time with a dot rather than colon, but most use
a colon.

German typography doesn't use French spacing as far as I know.

For Slovenian:
- OT1 and LY1 are not suitable encondings.
- Glossary is not a slovenian word. It should probably be "Slovar"
- headto = Prejme is weird
- righthyphenmin = 2
- I don't understand the zillion entries about hyphenchar, but it must
be similar to other European languages.
- Having just "quotes =" might not be sufficient if you want to
automatically support quotes one day like ConTeXt does with
\quote{...} and \quotation{...}. We use two flavours (one can decide
to use either one or the other) and in both flavours one has both
single and double quotes.
  (a) ›single‹ »double«
  (b) ‚single‘ „double“
- What is meant with "exponential = e"? (I use $2{,}1\cdot 10^{-5}$ or
perhaps \times instead of \cdot.) Isn't "e" just a convention for
entering numbers into computers that has absolutely nothing to do with
typography?

I'm not sure if it's correct to use "po n. št." or just "n. št." (at
some point you will probably have to introduce comments in those ini
files). But we don't have BCE. So you might want to use something like
this (I don't want to certify correctness):

eras.abbreviated.0-alt-variant = pr. Kr.
eras.abbreviated.0 = pr. n. št.
eras.abbreviated.1 = po n. št.
eras.abbreviated.1-alt-variant = po Kr.
eras.wide.0-alt-variant = pred Kristusom
eras.wide.0 = pred našim štetjem
eras.wide.1 = našega štetja % or "po našem štetju"
eras.wide.1-alt-variant = po Kristusu
eras.narrow.0-alt-variant = pr. Kr.
eras.narrow.0 = pr. n. št.
eras.narrow.1 = po n. št.
eras.narrow.1-alt-variant = po Kr.

The following is useless (= nobody will understand):

dayPeriods.format.narrow.am = d
dayPeriods.format.narrow.noon = n
dayPeriods.format.narrow.pm = p

We use numbers 0-23 to denote hour of the day rather than some bogus "d/n/p".

Mojca



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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Javier Bezos]

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.

Javier


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Javier Bezos]

Zdeněk,

Thank you very much. Very useful, and you confirm my suspect
the data in the CLDR is not always reliable. Furthermore, it's
obvious it's intended mainly for displaying plain text in
some especific contexts and not for fine typesetting. At first
my idea was to sinchronize more or less regularly the ini files
with the CLDR, but now I'm not sure it's a good idea.


I do not understand the meaning of the encoding field.


The goal is to provide information about which encodings
support or have supported the language, even partially
(definitely, one couldn't say OT1 supports any language
except English and a few others). This field is essentially
informative.


I understand hyphenchar (should be the same as in English in all mentioned
languages) but do not understand the other hyphen* fields.


Most of them are intended for luatex (only for the languages
they make sense, of course).

Javier




The minus sign in both Czech and Slovak should be –

The quotes in both Czech and Slovak are „ and “ (the closing quote has its
codepoint in Unicode but is rarely present in fonts, it is better to use
English opening quote which has the same shape).

In Czech (and maybe also in Slovak) the time separator is a period, in
sport results and time tables a colon is used.

Slovak: characters Ä Ď Ô Ť in index look strange to me, it should be proved
by a native Slovak speaker.

Hindi


See the note on the encoding above

A few misprints and missing items in the captions
bib = संदर्भ-ग्रन्थ (or संदर्भ-ग्रंथ)
contents - the version you have is one of the alternatives suggested by
Anshuman Pandey but most books I have bought in India contain अनुक्रम
part = खण्ड (or खंड)
page = पृष्ठ
proof = प्रमाण
glossary = शब्दार्थ सूची

cc, encl, and headto make no sense, I am probably the only man who writes
business e-mails in Hindi...

I have never seen abreviated months (a native Hindi speaker should help).
The only abbreviations for days of week I have seen at the Aligarh railway
station are:
Monday = सो॰, Tuesday = मं॰, Wednesday = बु॰, Thursday = बृह॰, Friday = शुक॰
(or शुक्र॰, the plate was not clearly readable), Saturday = शनि॰, Sunday =
रवि॰. I would not be surprized if the ॰ punctuation were omitted.

[characters] ङ  and ञ are not used in Hindi, they should be removed from index

frenchspacing – I am afraid that it has no sense in Hindi as well as other
Indic languages. The proper spacing was implemented in GNU Freefont (at
least for Hindi) and is activated automatically by language switching. The
rules are explained (in Hindi only, links to other languages switch to a
different text) at
https://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%80%E0%A4%A1%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%BE:%E0%A4%B9%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A6%E0%A5%80_%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%82_%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF_%E0%A4%97%E0%A4%B2%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%81

punctuation: danda । and double danda ॥ should be listed as the most
important punctuation
quotes: either English double quotes or English single quotes are used
(depends on the preference of an author and/or a publisher)

number: Both Devanagari and Arabic digits are used, it is hard to say which
one should be he default

counters: the way how list items are numbered does not conform to the LaTeX
system. I have a normative document how it should be done, it is written in
Marathi and I probably have also a Hindi version. Unfortunately I have not
found time to implement it so far.



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

2016-03-23 19:31 GMT+01:00 Javier Bezos >:

Hi all,

I'm working on a new version of babel, with a new way to define
languages in a descriptive way, more than in a programmatic one (of
course, the latter won't be excluded because it's still necessary).

The idea is to create a set of ini file like those you can find on


https://latex-project.org/svnroot/latex2e-public/trunk/required/babel/locales/

They are tentative and some of them are incomplete. I'm working on the
code to read and 'transform' their data, but in the meanwhile I'd like
to improve the ini files. The first step in the roadmap is to provide
real utf-8 strings for captions and dates with current styles so
that they can be useable even without fontenc.

Any help or comments would be greatly appreciated.

[Crossposted to xetex and luatex lists.]

Javier


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

Only ञ is a part of ज्ञ but it seems to me that the index filed lists
characters that may be used as a heading in the index. Thus ञ should not be
listed.

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

2016-03-23 23:29 GMT+01:00 BPJ :

> > characters] ङ  and ञ are not used in Hindi, they should be removed from
> index
>
> Aren't they used in conjuncts either?
>
> /bpj
>
>
> onsdag 23 mars 2016 skrev Zdenek Wagner :
>
>> Hi Javier,
>>
>> I am copying my reply to the cstex list because I am not autoritative for
>> Slovak and maybe I will not be precise enough. I am giving my commnents to
>> Czech (cs.ini), Slovak (sk.ini), and Hindi (hi.ini). Some comments are
>> common for all.
>>
>> I do not understand the meaning of the encoding field. T1 and OT1 are
>> font encodings for use with 8-bit TeX, XeTeX is able to use UTF-8 or UTF-16
>> and such fonts are available. IL2 (in Czech) was historically used in
>> cslatex. It is preserved for legacy documents but deprecated, unsupported
>> in babel and should be deleted. I know nothing about LY1. Before Unicode
>> there existed many private encodings for Devanagari, many web pages used it
>> and it was necessary to install a special font. Such fonts can still be
>> found but IMO there is no sense to support them.
>>
>> I understand hyphenchar (should be the same as in English in all
>> mentioned languages) but do not understand the other hyphen* fields.
>>
>> The minus sign in both Czech and Slovak should be –
>>
>> The quotes in both Czech and Slovak are „ and “ (the closing quote has
>> its codepoint in Unicode but is rarely present in fonts, it is better to
>> use English opening quote which has the same shape).
>>
>> In Czech (and maybe also in Slovak) the time separator is a period, in
>> sport results and time tables a colon is used.
>>
>> Slovak: characters Ä Ď Ô Ť in index look strange to me, it should be
>> proved by a native Slovak speaker.
>>
>> Hindi
>> 
>>
>> See the note on the encoding above
>>
>> A few misprints and missing items in the captions
>> bib = संदर्भ-ग्रन्थ (or संदर्भ-ग्रंथ)
>> contents - the version you have is one of the alternatives suggested by
>> Anshuman Pandey but most books I have bought in India contain अनुक्रम
>> part = खण्ड (or खंड)
>> page = पृष्ठ
>> proof = प्रमाण
>> glossary = शब्दार्थ सूची
>>
>> cc, encl, and headto make no sense, I am probably the only man who writes
>> business e-mails in Hindi...
>>
>> I have never seen abreviated months (a native Hindi speaker should help).
>> The only abbreviations for days of week I have seen at the Aligarh railway
>> station are:
>> Monday = सो॰, Tuesday = मं॰, Wednesday = बु॰, Thursday = बृह॰, Friday =
>> शुक॰ (or शुक्र॰, the plate was not clearly readable), Saturday = शनि॰,
>> Sunday = रवि॰. I would not be surprized if the ॰ punctuation were omitted.
>>
>> [characters] ङ  and ञ are not used in Hindi, they should be removed from
>> index
>>
>> frenchspacing – I am afraid that it has no sense in Hindi as well as
>> other Indic languages. The proper spacing was implemented in GNU Freefont
>> (at least for Hindi) and is activated automatically by language switching.
>> The rules are explained (in Hindi only, links to other languages switch to
>> a different text) at
>>
>> https://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%80%E0%A4%A1%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%BE:%E0%A4%B9%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A6%E0%A5%80_%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%82_%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF_%E0%A4%97%E0%A4%B2%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%81
>>
>> punctuation: danda । and double danda ॥ should be listed as the most
>> important punctuation
>> quotes: either English double quotes or English single quotes are used
>> (depends on the preference of an author and/or a publisher)
>>
>> number: Both Devanagari and Arabic digits are used, it is hard to say
>> which one should be he default
>>
>> counters: the way how list items are numbered does not conform to the
>> LaTeX system. I have a normative document how it should be done, it is
>> written in Marathi and I probably have also a Hindi version. Unfortunately
>> I have not found time to implement it so far.
>>
>>
>>
>> Zdeněk Wagner
>> http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
>> http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
>>
>> 2016-03-23 19:31 GMT+01:00 Javier Bezos :
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I'm working on a new version of babel, with a new way to define
>>> languages in a descriptive way, more than in a programmatic one (of
>>> course, the latter won't be excluded because it's still necessary).
>>>
>>> The idea is to create a set of ini file like those you can find on
>>>
>>>
>>> https://latex-project.org/svnroot/latex2e-public/trunk/required/babel/locales/
>>>
>>> They are tentative and some of them are incomplete. I'm working on the
>>> code to read and 'transform' their data, but in the 

Re: [XeTeX] babel

[BPJ]

> characters] ङ  and ञ are not used in Hindi, they should be removed from
index

Aren't they used in conjuncts either?

/bpj


onsdag 23 mars 2016 skrev Zdenek Wagner :

> Hi Javier,
>
> I am copying my reply to the cstex list because I am not autoritative for
> Slovak and maybe I will not be precise enough. I am giving my commnents to
> Czech (cs.ini), Slovak (sk.ini), and Hindi (hi.ini). Some comments are
> common for all.
>
> I do not understand the meaning of the encoding field. T1 and OT1 are font
> encodings for use with 8-bit TeX, XeTeX is able to use UTF-8 or UTF-16 and
> such fonts are available. IL2 (in Czech) was historically used in cslatex.
> It is preserved for legacy documents but deprecated, unsupported in babel
> and should be deleted. I know nothing about LY1. Before Unicode there
> existed many private encodings for Devanagari, many web pages used it and
> it was necessary to install a special font. Such fonts can still be found
> but IMO there is no sense to support them.
>
> I understand hyphenchar (should be the same as in English in all mentioned
> languages) but do not understand the other hyphen* fields.
>
> The minus sign in both Czech and Slovak should be –
>
> The quotes in both Czech and Slovak are „ and “ (the closing quote has its
> codepoint in Unicode but is rarely present in fonts, it is better to use
> English opening quote which has the same shape).
>
> In Czech (and maybe also in Slovak) the time separator is a period, in
> sport results and time tables a colon is used.
>
> Slovak: characters Ä Ď Ô Ť in index look strange to me, it should be
> proved by a native Slovak speaker.
>
> Hindi
> 
>
> See the note on the encoding above
>
> A few misprints and missing items in the captions
> bib = संदर्भ-ग्रन्थ (or संदर्भ-ग्रंथ)
> contents - the version you have is one of the alternatives suggested by
> Anshuman Pandey but most books I have bought in India contain अनुक्रम
> part = खण्ड (or खंड)
> page = पृष्ठ
> proof = प्रमाण
> glossary = शब्दार्थ सूची
>
> cc, encl, and headto make no sense, I am probably the only man who writes
> business e-mails in Hindi...
>
> I have never seen abreviated months (a native Hindi speaker should help).
> The only abbreviations for days of week I have seen at the Aligarh railway
> station are:
> Monday = सो॰, Tuesday = मं॰, Wednesday = बु॰, Thursday = बृह॰, Friday =
> शुक॰ (or शुक्र॰, the plate was not clearly readable), Saturday = शनि॰,
> Sunday = रवि॰. I would not be surprized if the ॰ punctuation were omitted.
>
> [characters] ङ  and ञ are not used in Hindi, they should be removed from
> index
>
> frenchspacing – I am afraid that it has no sense in Hindi as well as other
> Indic languages. The proper spacing was implemented in GNU Freefont (at
> least for Hindi) and is activated automatically by language switching. The
> rules are explained (in Hindi only, links to other languages switch to a
> different text) at
>
> https://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%80%E0%A4%A1%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%BE:%E0%A4%B9%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A6%E0%A5%80_%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%82_%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF_%E0%A4%97%E0%A4%B2%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%81
>
> punctuation: danda । and double danda ॥ should be listed as the most
> important punctuation
> quotes: either English double quotes or English single quotes are used
> (depends on the preference of an author and/or a publisher)
>
> number: Both Devanagari and Arabic digits are used, it is hard to say
> which one should be he default
>
> counters: the way how list items are numbered does not conform to the
> LaTeX system. I have a normative document how it should be done, it is
> written in Marathi and I probably have also a Hindi version. Unfortunately
> I have not found time to implement it so far.
>
>
>
> Zdeněk Wagner
> http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
> http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
>
> 2016-03-23 19:31 GMT+01:00 Javier Bezos  >:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm working on a new version of babel, with a new way to define
>> languages in a descriptive way, more than in a programmatic one (of
>> course, the latter won't be excluded because it's still necessary).
>>
>> The idea is to create a set of ini file like those you can find on
>>
>>
>> https://latex-project.org/svnroot/latex2e-public/trunk/required/babel/locales/
>>
>> They are tentative and some of them are incomplete. I'm working on the
>> code to read and 'transform' their data, but in the meanwhile I'd like
>> to improve the ini files. The first step in the roadmap is to provide
>> real utf-8 strings for captions and dates with current styles so
>> that they can be useable even without fontenc.
>>
>> Any help or comments would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>> [Crossposted to xetex and luatex lists.]
>>
>> Javier
>>
>>
>> 

Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

Hi Javier,

I am copying my reply to the cstex list because I am not autoritative for
Slovak and maybe I will not be precise enough. I am giving my commnents to
Czech (cs.ini), Slovak (sk.ini), and Hindi (hi.ini). Some comments are
common for all.

I do not understand the meaning of the encoding field. T1 and OT1 are font
encodings for use with 8-bit TeX, XeTeX is able to use UTF-8 or UTF-16 and
such fonts are available. IL2 (in Czech) was historically used in cslatex.
It is preserved for legacy documents but deprecated, unsupported in babel
and should be deleted. I know nothing about LY1. Before Unicode there
existed many private encodings for Devanagari, many web pages used it and
it was necessary to install a special font. Such fonts can still be found
but IMO there is no sense to support them.

I understand hyphenchar (should be the same as in English in all mentioned
languages) but do not understand the other hyphen* fields.

The minus sign in both Czech and Slovak should be –

The quotes in both Czech and Slovak are „ and “ (the closing quote has its
codepoint in Unicode but is rarely present in fonts, it is better to use
English opening quote which has the same shape).

In Czech (and maybe also in Slovak) the time separator is a period, in
sport results and time tables a colon is used.

Slovak: characters Ä Ď Ô Ť in index look strange to me, it should be proved
by a native Slovak speaker.

Hindi


See the note on the encoding above

A few misprints and missing items in the captions
bib = संदर्भ-ग्रन्थ (or संदर्भ-ग्रंथ)
contents - the version you have is one of the alternatives suggested by
Anshuman Pandey but most books I have bought in India contain अनुक्रम
part = खण्ड (or खंड)
page = पृष्ठ
proof = प्रमाण
glossary = शब्दार्थ सूची

cc, encl, and headto make no sense, I am probably the only man who writes
business e-mails in Hindi...

I have never seen abreviated months (a native Hindi speaker should help).
The only abbreviations for days of week I have seen at the Aligarh railway
station are:
Monday = सो॰, Tuesday = मं॰, Wednesday = बु॰, Thursday = बृह॰, Friday =
शुक॰ (or शुक्र॰, the plate was not clearly readable), Saturday = शनि॰,
Sunday = रवि॰. I would not be surprized if the ॰ punctuation were omitted.

[characters] ङ  and ञ are not used in Hindi, they should be removed from
index

frenchspacing – I am afraid that it has no sense in Hindi as well as other
Indic languages. The proper spacing was implemented in GNU Freefont (at
least for Hindi) and is activated automatically by language switching. The
rules are explained (in Hindi only, links to other languages switch to a
different text) at
https://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%80%E0%A4%A1%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%BE:%E0%A4%B9%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A6%E0%A5%80_%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%82_%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF_%E0%A4%97%E0%A4%B2%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%81

punctuation: danda । and double danda ॥ should be listed as the most
important punctuation
quotes: either English double quotes or English single quotes are used
(depends on the preference of an author and/or a publisher)

number: Both Devanagari and Arabic digits are used, it is hard to say which
one should be he default

counters: the way how list items are numbered does not conform to the LaTeX
system. I have a normative document how it should be done, it is written in
Marathi and I probably have also a Hindi version. Unfortunately I have not
found time to implement it so far.



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

2016-03-23 19:31 GMT+01:00 Javier Bezos :

> Hi all,
>
> I'm working on a new version of babel, with a new way to define
> languages in a descriptive way, more than in a programmatic one (of
> course, the latter won't be excluded because it's still necessary).
>
> The idea is to create a set of ini file like those you can find on
>
>
> https://latex-project.org/svnroot/latex2e-public/trunk/required/babel/locales/
>
> They are tentative and some of them are incomplete. I'm working on the
> code to read and 'transform' their data, but in the meanwhile I'd like
> to improve the ini files. The first step in the roadmap is to provide
> real utf-8 strings for captions and dates with current styles so
> that they can be useable even without fontenc.
>
> Any help or comments would be greatly appreciated.
>
> [Crossposted to xetex and luatex lists.]
>
> Javier
>
>
> --
> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>  http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
>


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[XeTeX] babel

[Javier Bezos]

Hi all,

I'm working on a new version of babel, with a new way to define
languages in a descriptive way, more than in a programmatic one (of
course, the latter won't be excluded because it's still necessary).

The idea is to create a set of ini file like those you can find on

https://latex-project.org/svnroot/latex2e-public/trunk/required/babel/locales/

They are tentative and some of them are incomplete. I'm working on the
code to read and 'transform' their data, but in the meanwhile I'd like
to improve the ini files. The first step in the roadmap is to provide
real utf-8 strings for captions and dates with current styles so
that they can be useable even without fontenc.

Any help or comments would be greatly appreciated.

[Crossposted to xetex and luatex lists.]

Javier


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[XeTeX] babel 3.9 beta

[Javier Bezos]

Hi all,

A beta version is babel 3.9 is now available. For further info see:

http://www.tex-tipografia.com/babel_news.html

Javier


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[XeTeX] babel and sanskrit (again) and related questions

[François Patte]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Bonjour,

I just discovered that babel is working well with sanskrit! Only one file
is missing: sanskrit.ldf. I made an (ugly) hack of english.ldf and any
text after \selectlanguage{sanskrit} is correctly hyphenated (both
scripts: roman tranliteration and devanagari).

Questions

1- Will it be possible to have an official sanskrit.ldf, correctly
adapted to sanskrit?

2- As the file  hyph-sa.tex which gives the hyphenation patterns can be
used for many scripts: roman, devanagari, bengali, kannada Is it
possible to build only one sankrit.ldf file for all these scripts?

3- Is it possible to include in this file some commands like
\catcode`\~=12 which is necessary to use Velthuis-sanskrit mapping? Of
course this change to the catcode should be active only in Sanskrit
texts! BTW with this change to the catcode of ~, hard space is lost;
is it possible to have another character usable as hard space in
Velthuis Sanskrit texts?

4- Writing a Devanagari text using Velthuis mapping or RomDev mapping
produces a very compact text and a change to the baseline skip should be
necessary (scaled to 1.25 at least...); is this change can be include
somewhere or is there something to change in the font itself?


Best regards.
- -- 
François Patte
UFR de mathématiques et informatique
Laboratoire CNRS MAP5, UMR 8145
Université Paris Descartes
45, rue des Saints Pères
F-75270 Paris Cedex 06
Tél. +33 (0)1 8394 5849
http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iEYEARECAAYFAlCY3I0ACgkQdE6C2dhV2JVf5QCgmtmXZw09/vtdoYkXiiNL+pXx
6zEAoICs6WCrrgHb3pv3LPV/aEt7ZO/3
=ywTv
-END PGP SIGNATURE-


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[FC]

2012/9/4 Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wag...@gmail.com

 That's bad news! I thought that François Charette implemented French
 in Polyglossia well. What is missing? Maybe it could be implemented
 fast. And are there good OpenType fonts for French? I know that French
 uses tiny spaces preceding double punctuation. This is a similar case
 as in Hindi where some spaces are used in front of question marks and
 exclamation marks (I found it i some article written by an Indian
 typographer). IMHO it should be a property of a font, not of a
 typesetting system. GNU FreeFont already contains such language
 features. Probably Steve White would know how to implement
 Language=French so that colons, semicolons, question and exclamation
 marks had proper French spacing.


I was the first to admit publically that French support in polyglossia was
suboptimal. I did some initial work with \XeTeXinterchartoks to have the
most important typographical features covered (in theory the spacing around
colons, semicolons, question and exclamation marks should be handled
properly, but this was never seriously tested). Also as a matter of
principle I never wanted to use active characters in polyglossia, but most
importantly I left the rest of the work for others to do because -- besides
the time issue -- I was not much interested in doing it! Despite French
being my mother language, as a French Canadian I am not very familiar with
the French typographical tradition, and rarely used French for my
professional work (my main interest for developing polyglossia was in
supporting languages in non-Latin scripts: Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Indic
scripts, etc.)

In any case, let's hope the current maintainer Arthur Reutenauer will take
care to coordinate fixing this important lacuna in polyglossia. Many people
complained about this over the years, but IIRC the only person who actually
helped was Enrico Gregorio. If Ulrike is right that frenchb is already
adapted for XeTeX, then the task may not be as complex as it was 3 years
ago.

While I am on this list let me ask you a related question. When Arthur took
up maintenance of polyglossia last year his main goal was to support
LuaLaTeX as well as XeLaTeX. Any news about this?

Regards,
François Charette


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Joel C. Salomon]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 3:11 PM, François Charette firmicu...@gmail.com wrote:
 While I am on this list let me ask you a related question. When Arthur took
 up maintenance of polyglossia last year his main goal was to support
 LuaLaTeX as well as XeLaTeX. Any news about this?

About a month ago Arthur Reutenauer posted to this list (and some
others) that experimental support for LuaTeX had been added in the
development version he maintains at
http://gitub.com/reutenauer/polyglossia.

The announcement is at http://tug.org/pipermail/xetex/2012-August/023492.html.

—Joel



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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Joel C. Salomon]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Joel C. Salomon joelcsalo...@gmail.com wrote:
 http://gitub.com/reutenauer/polyglossia.

…and of course I copied his typo. That should be
http://github.com/reutenauer/polyglossia, of course.

—Joel



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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Steve White]

Hi,

Zdenek, again I've come in to the middle of a conversation...

It's not clear to me how to implement the rules, or who is responsible
for implementing them (or quite what the rules ought to be).

Yes it is possible to implement, for instance, a french-specific
kerning in an OpenType font, that would implement greater spacing for
punctuation in French text only.

I have seen articles such as http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponctuation
which advocate implementing punctuation spaces by using non-breaking space.
To my eyes, such spaces seem excessive, and greater that what I see in
a few French books I have.  But if this is how the spacing is to be
done, I don't understand why it's appropriate for the font to
implement the spacing.

A bunch of hard publications are referenced in that article.  Anybody
have a copy?

Cheers!

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 9:11 PM, FC firmicu...@gmail.com wrote:

 2012/9/4 Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wag...@gmail.com

 That's bad news! I thought that François Charette implemented French
 in Polyglossia well. What is missing? Maybe it could be implemented
 fast. And are there good OpenType fonts for French? I know that French
 uses tiny spaces preceding double punctuation. This is a similar case
 as in Hindi where some spaces are used in front of question marks and
 exclamation marks (I found it i some article written by an Indian
 typographer). IMHO it should be a property of a font, not of a
 typesetting system. GNU FreeFont already contains such language
 features. Probably Steve White would know how to implement
 Language=French so that colons, semicolons, question and exclamation
 marks had proper French spacing.


 I was the first to admit publically that French support in polyglossia was
 suboptimal. I did some initial work with \XeTeXinterchartoks to have the
 most important typographical features covered (in theory the spacing around
 colons, semicolons, question and exclamation marks should be handled
 properly, but this was never seriously tested). Also as a matter of
 principle I never wanted to use active characters in polyglossia, but most
 importantly I left the rest of the work for others to do because -- besides
 the time issue -- I was not much interested in doing it! Despite French
 being my mother language, as a French Canadian I am not very familiar with
 the French typographical tradition, and rarely used French for my
 professional work (my main interest for developing polyglossia was in
 supporting languages in non-Latin scripts: Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Indic
 scripts, etc.)

 In any case, let's hope the current maintainer Arthur Reutenauer will take
 care to coordinate fixing this important lacuna in polyglossia. Many people
 complained about this over the years, but IIRC the only person who actually
 helped was Enrico Gregorio. If Ulrike is right that frenchb is already
 adapted for XeTeX, then the task may not be as complex as it was 3 years
 ago.

 While I am on this list let me ask you a related question. When Arthur took
 up maintenance of polyglossia last year his main goal was to support
 LuaLaTeX as well as XeLaTeX. Any news about this?

 Regards,
 François Charette



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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Arthur Reutenauer]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 03:34:19PM -0400, Joel C. Salomon wrote:
 About a month ago Arthur Reutenauer posted to this list (and some
 others) that experimental support for LuaTeX had been added in the
 development version he maintains at
 http://github.com/reutenauer/polyglossia.

  The support then was too shaky to make a beta release and I expected
it would take me a couple of weeks to complete it, but I've been held up
by other things in the mean time.  I'll make a release to CTAN when it's
ready to be tested.

  (Note that I corrected a typo in the URL of my original announcement,
reproduced by Joel.)

Arthur


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Tobias Schoel]

Hi,

[snip]


Two possible smartfont techniques for such locale feature are:
- alternate french punctuation marks with larger sidebearings: this is
very unflexible for users (punctuation characters without additional
space or with different space width are troublesome) but of course
simplifies the typesetting engines’ troubles the most.
- contextual variant of the non breaking space character: the
typesetter or their engine has to enter a space at the correct place
that then gets replaced by a (narrower) variant; here I think the
engine’s troubles aren’t really diminuished a lot, but the users’ might
rise. What’s more, contextual lookups that involve space don’t work
with XeTeX, so this is not very lucky here too.
As far as I know, TeX's view of spaces is to not handle them as 
characters but as space without characters. So I don't understand, why 
French Spacing should change in any way between pdftex and xetex. Space 
without characters doesn't care for encoding nor fonts, because there is 
no character to be encoded or handled in any way by a font.




Unicode already provides for a bunch of different space characters. IMO,
type designers should provide their fonts with appropriate space
characters (eg. 6-per-em space or thin space) and the typesetter or
their engine should check for the presence of that character and use it.


Even if whitespace is left to the font, which is perfectly reasonable 
but not the TeX way, why should French Spacing be left to the font at all?


It's simply checking for a flag that says I want French Spacing and 
then including white space (in whatever form) at appropriate places. You 
can take appropriate white space from the font according to your liking 
(there are many in space codepoints in unicode) or do it yourself. At 
the most you can ask unicode to include a special Space in front of 
some punctuation in French-codepoint, but I doubt that would be 
successful nowadays.


BYe

Toscho


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/9/6 Tobias Schoel liesdieda...@googlemail.com:
 Hi,

 [snip]


 Two possible smartfont techniques for such locale feature are:
 - alternate french punctuation marks with larger sidebearings: this is
 very unflexible for users (punctuation characters without additional
 space or with different space width are troublesome) but of course
 simplifies the typesetting engines' troubles the most.
 - contextual variant of the non breaking space character: the
 typesetter or their engine has to enter a space at the correct place
 that then gets replaced by a (narrower) variant; here I think the
 engine's troubles aren't really diminuished a lot, but the users' might
 rise. What's more, contextual lookups that involve space don't work
 with XeTeX, so this is not very lucky here too.

 As far as I know, TeX's view of spaces is to not handle them as characters
 but as space without characters. So I don't understand, why French Spacing
 should change in any way between pdftex and xetex. Space without characters
 doesn't care for encoding nor fonts, because there is no character to be
 encoded or handled in any way by a font.



 Unicode already provides for a bunch of different space characters. IMO,
 type designers should provide their fonts with appropriate space
 characters (eg. 6-per-em space or thin space) and the typesetter or
 their engine should check for the presence of that character and use it.


 Even if whitespace is left to the font, which is perfectly reasonable but
 not the TeX way, why should French Spacing be left to the font at all?

 It's simply checking for a flag that says I want French Spacing and then
 including white space (in whatever form) at appropriate places. You can take
 appropriate white space from the font according to your liking (there are
 many in space codepoints in unicode) or do it yourself. At the most you can
 ask unicode to include a special Space in front of some punctuation in
 French-codepoint, but I doubt that would be successful nowadays.

No, such a codepoint is not needed and it will require additional work
from the authors. If you understand OpenType internals, look how
explanation and question marks are handled in the Devanagari script in
GNU FreeFont. This is the right way because it does not need TeX
solution in order to achieve the correct spacing. You can use the font
in Word, in OpenOffice, in InDesign, on the web page and the spacing
will be correct.

 BYe

 Toscho



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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/9/6 Georg Duffner g.duff...@gmail.com:
 Hi,

 Am 2012-09-06 16:36, schrieb Zdenek Wagner:

 2012/9/6 Tobias Schoel liesdieda...@googlemail.com:


 It's simply checking for a flag that says I want French Spacing and
 then
 including white space (in whatever form) at appropriate places. You can
 take
 appropriate white space from the font according to your liking (there are
 many in space codepoints in unicode) or do it yourself. At the most you
 can
 ask unicode to include a special Space in front of some punctuation in
 French-codepoint, but I doubt that would be successful nowadays.

 No, such a codepoint is not needed and it will require additional work
 from the authors. If you understand OpenType internals, look how
 explanation and question marks are handled in the Devanagari script in
 GNU FreeFont. This is the right way because it does not need TeX
 solution in order to achieve the correct spacing. You can use the font
 in Word, in OpenOffice, in InDesign, on the web page and the spacing
 will be correct.


 OK, this is the first variant I mentioned and it's interesting to see that
 it's hardcoded this way. I'm not on principle against such solution, but I
 see more problems than advantages. Some questions:
 - Do other fonts share this feature?

Unfortunatelly not. When using other fonts, the author must insert
nonbreakable space of correct width manually.

 - What would an indic person do if they wanted to write about a question
 mark? Do they switch off the script setting? (I'm a linguist, so meta-level
 typesetting is interesting to me)

They activate the Devanagari script (it is necessary otherwise
everything will be wrong). Then they use norma question and
exclamation marks. In Devanagari they behave in a different way than
in English but it is exactly the same codepoint.

 - What do you do when dynamic spacing (as usual in textsetting like in Word)
 is applied? Spaces might decrease below the width of the whitespace in
 question- and exclamation mark which stays unvariable.

This is exactly what is expected by Indian typographers.

 - How was this treated with in metal typesetting?

Probably the space was a part of the glyph. The oldest book I have was
printed in India in 1983. The spacing is the same as I see in newer
books and as implemented in GNU FreeFont.

 Best regards,
 Georg



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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Georg Duffner]

Am 2012-09-04 13:23, schrieb Zdenek Wagner:

2012/9/4 Philip TAYLOR p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk:



Zdenek Wagner wrote:


Language feature of a font.



OK, now understood, but this does not address my concern
regarding the countless extant fonts that do not have
such a feature.  Would it not be better to postulate
a solution that can be used with any extant font ?


My point is that if it were done in the font, it would be done once
and could be used not only in TeX but also in other programs as
Scribus, InDesign etc. If the font designer were a good typographer,
the spaces could be tuned to match the font. I think that Computer
Modern needs larger spaces than Times Roman and there are even more
condensed fonts. Thus the font designer could do it better. For me TeX
solution is for the case that the feature is not implemented in the
font. And it is good that it can be done in TeX. The ideal system
should allow users to switch between using font features and macros.
If the system offered inserting features dynamically without requiring
users to understand font internals, it would be even better.



As somebody who’s a little bit involved in fontdesign, I don’t think 
this should be put in the font. The smartness of smartfonts shouldn’t 
try to replace the typesetters’ or their engines’ intelligence—because 
it simply cannot. Keeping a font universally usable forbids many things 
that could be easily done with smartfont techniques. For the very case 
of french punctuation imagine a french person who wants to print one of 
them without spacing or with a normal space. This might be a rare case, 
but it does happen. Should they switch to another locale for that case 
although the loacale didn’t change at all?


Two possible smartfont techniques for such locale feature are:
- alternate french punctuation marks with larger sidebearings: this is 
very unflexible for users (punctuation characters without additional 
space or with different space width are troublesome) but of course 
simplifies the typesetting engines’ troubles the most.
- contextual variant of the non breaking space character: the 
typesetter or their engine has to enter a space at the correct place 
that then gets replaced by a (narrower) variant; here I think the 
engine’s troubles aren’t really diminuished a lot, but the users’ might 
rise. What’s more, contextual lookups that involve space don’t work 
with XeTeX, so this is not very lucky here too.


Unicode already provides for a bunch of different space characters. IMO, 
type designers should provide their fonts with appropriate space 
characters (eg. 6-per-em space or thin space) and the typesetter or 
their engine should check for the presence of that character and use it.


Best regards,
Georg
--
EB Garamond: http://www.georgduffner.at/ebgaramond


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[François Patte]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Le 03/09/2012 20:16, Zdenek Wagner a écrit :
 2012/9/3 Javier Bezos lis...@tex-tipografia.com:
 François,


 Some times ago, I read that babel will be compatible with xelatex.

 I would like to use babel with french and sanskrit languages, do I have
 any chance to succeed?

 Maintainig babel is important for (pdf)latex which is still in use but
 for XeLaTeX I would suggest polyglossia which already works. You can
 input the Devanagari text either directly in UTF-8 or in a
 transliteration (including Velthuis) using the xetex-devanagari
 package. You can request transliteration from Velthuis by
 Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit (Mapping=velthuis is used for Hindi, you
 will have to write explicitly viramas after the final consonants).
 There are several Devanagari fonts available, for instance Nakula and
 Sahadeva by John Smith or GNU FreeFont. You need at least release
 20120503, in older releases the Devanagari block is incorrect. This
 release is already packaged in TeX Live 2012. Devanagari in FreeSans
 is derived from Gargi, thus it does not contain all Sanskrit
 conjuncts, FreeSerif contains Velthuis glyphs. When the font is
 loaded, it even obeys switching Language=Sanskrit and Language=Hindi
 (the latter coresponding to the @modernhindi instruction in devnag).
 Moreover, GNU FreeFont is most probably the only font with correct
 spacing of Devanagari punctuation. I would certainly use Polyglossia +
 GNU FreeSerif in XeLaTeX.

I installed texlive-2012 and, I'm trying FreeSerif fonts. As far as I
can see, there are no italics for devanagari, am I right?

Will it be available some day?

Thanks


- -- 
François Patte
UFR de mathématiques et informatique
Laboratoire MAP5 --- UMR CNRS 8145
Université Paris Descartes
45, rue des Saints P?res
F-75270 Paris Cedex 06
Tél. +33 (0)1 8394 5849
http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte
-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

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=XSz+
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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/9/5 François Patte francois.pa...@mi.parisdescartes.fr:
 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1

 Le 03/09/2012 20:16, Zdenek Wagner a écrit :
 2012/9/3 Javier Bezos lis...@tex-tipografia.com:
 François,


 Some times ago, I read that babel will be compatible with xelatex.

 I would like to use babel with french and sanskrit languages, do I have
 any chance to succeed?

 Maintainig babel is important for (pdf)latex which is still in use but
 for XeLaTeX I would suggest polyglossia which already works. You can
 input the Devanagari text either directly in UTF-8 or in a
 transliteration (including Velthuis) using the xetex-devanagari
 package. You can request transliteration from Velthuis by
 Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit (Mapping=velthuis is used for Hindi, you
 will have to write explicitly viramas after the final consonants).
 There are several Devanagari fonts available, for instance Nakula and
 Sahadeva by John Smith or GNU FreeFont. You need at least release
 20120503, in older releases the Devanagari block is incorrect. This
 release is already packaged in TeX Live 2012. Devanagari in FreeSans
 is derived from Gargi, thus it does not contain all Sanskrit
 conjuncts, FreeSerif contains Velthuis glyphs. When the font is
 loaded, it even obeys switching Language=Sanskrit and Language=Hindi
 (the latter coresponding to the @modernhindi instruction in devnag).
 Moreover, GNU FreeFont is most probably the only font with correct
 spacing of Devanagari punctuation. I would certainly use Polyglossia +
 GNU FreeSerif in XeLaTeX.

 I installed texlive-2012 and, I'm trying FreeSerif fonts. As far as I
 can see, there are no italics for devanagari, am I right?

Unfortunatelly they are missing. They can be created by geometrical
slanting but I do not remember the fontspec keyword.

 Will it be available some day?

Only Steve White can answer this question.

 Thanks


 - --
 François Patte
 UFR de mathématiques et informatique
 Laboratoire MAP5 --- UMR CNRS 8145
 Université Paris Descartes
 45, rue des Saints P?res
 F-75270 Paris Cedex 06
 Tél. +33 (0)1 8394 5849
 http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte
 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
 Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
 Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

 iEYEARECAAYFAlBHfi8ACgkQdE6C2dhV2JU9NQCgy2zDjXLWBIIoAtzAl/jdqbTU
 RwgAnA6tr3hT3n/mu+wYrfg0HVfYhlaB
 =XSz+
 -END PGP SIGNATURE-


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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Fontspec manual, para 10.13:

In rare situations users may want to mechanically distort the shapes of the
glyphs in
the current font such as shown in Example 37. Please don’t overuse these
features;
they are not a good alternative to having the real shapes.
If values are omitted, their defaults are as shown above.
If you want the bold shape to be faked automatically, or the italic shape to
be slanted automatically, use the AutoFakeBold and AutoFakeSlant features.
For
example, the following two invocations are equivalent:
\fontspec[AutoFakeBold=1.5]{Charis SIL}
\fontspec[BoldFeatures={FakeBold=1.5}]{Charis SIL}
If both of the AutoFake... features are used, then the bold italic font
will also be
faked.
The FakeBold and AutoFakeBold features are only available with the XETEX
engine and will be ignored in LuaTEX.



On 5 September 2012 18:53, Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wag...@gmail.com wrote:

 2012/9/5 François Patte francois.pa...@mi.parisdescartes.fr:
  -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
  Hash: SHA1
 
  Le 03/09/2012 20:16, Zdenek Wagner a écrit :
  2012/9/3 Javier Bezos lis...@tex-tipografia.com:
  François,
 
 
  Some times ago, I read that babel will be compatible with xelatex.
 
  I would like to use babel with french and sanskrit languages, do I
 have
  any chance to succeed?
 
  Maintainig babel is important for (pdf)latex which is still in use but
  for XeLaTeX I would suggest polyglossia which already works. You can
  input the Devanagari text either directly in UTF-8 or in a
  transliteration (including Velthuis) using the xetex-devanagari
  package. You can request transliteration from Velthuis by
  Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit (Mapping=velthuis is used for Hindi, you
  will have to write explicitly viramas after the final consonants).
  There are several Devanagari fonts available, for instance Nakula and
  Sahadeva by John Smith or GNU FreeFont. You need at least release
  20120503, in older releases the Devanagari block is incorrect. This
  release is already packaged in TeX Live 2012. Devanagari in FreeSans
  is derived from Gargi, thus it does not contain all Sanskrit
  conjuncts, FreeSerif contains Velthuis glyphs. When the font is
  loaded, it even obeys switching Language=Sanskrit and Language=Hindi
  (the latter coresponding to the @modernhindi instruction in devnag).
  Moreover, GNU FreeFont is most probably the only font with correct
  spacing of Devanagari punctuation. I would certainly use Polyglossia +
  GNU FreeSerif in XeLaTeX.
 
  I installed texlive-2012 and, I'm trying FreeSerif fonts. As far as I
  can see, there are no italics for devanagari, am I right?
 
 Unfortunatelly they are missing. They can be created by geometrical
 slanting but I do not remember the fontspec keyword.

  Will it be available some day?
 
 Only Steve White can answer this question.

  Thanks
 
 
  - --
  François Patte
  UFR de mathématiques et informatique
  Laboratoire MAP5 --- UMR CNRS 8145
  Université Paris Descartes
  45, rue des Saints P?res
  F-75270 Paris Cedex 06
  Tél. +33 (0)1 8394 5849
  http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte
  -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
  Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
  Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
 
  iEYEARECAAYFAlBHfi8ACgkQdE6C2dhV2JU9NQCgy2zDjXLWBIIoAtzAl/jdqbTU
  RwgAnA6tr3hT3n/mu+wYrfg0HVfYhlaB
  =XSz+
  -END PGP SIGNATURE-
 
 
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 --
 Zdeněk Wagner
 http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
 http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Mon, 3 Sep 2012 20:16:22 +0200 schrieb Zdenek Wagner:

 Some times ago, I read that babel will be compatible with xelatex.

 I would like to use babel with french and sanskrit languages, do I have
 any chance to succeed?

 Maintainig babel is important for (pdf)latex which is still in use but
 for XeLaTeX I would suggest polyglossia which already works.

Francois asked about french. gloss-french.ldf has around 100 lines
of code. A current frenchb.ldf for babel about 1200. French people
can't currently do without babel. 



-- 
Ulrike Fischer 
http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/



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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[François Patte]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Le 03/09/2012 20:16, Zdenek Wagner a écrit :
 2012/9/3 Javier Bezos lis...@tex-tipografia.com:
 François,
 
 
 Some times ago, I read that babel will be compatible with 
 xelatex.
 
 I would like to use babel with french and sanskrit languages, do
  I have any chance to succeed?
 
 Maintainig babel is important for (pdf)latex which is still in use 
 but for XeLaTeX I would suggest polyglossia which already works.

Dear Zednek,

Thank you for all these information about sanskrit (I knew some but
others are useful). My main problem is French: babel French is really a
very good help for French typography while French with polyglossia is
very poor!

If I could find somewhere a Rosetta stone to translate babel French
into polyglossia French, I certainly try to make this translation!

As for Devanagary script, I don't know FreeSerif fonts, I'll try them. I
presently use Velthuis fonts with the devnag preprocessor.

Thanks again.

F.P.

- -- 
François Patte
UFR de mathématiques et informatique
Laboratoire MAP5 --- UMR CNRS 8145
Université Paris Descartes
45, rue des Saints Pères
F-75270 Paris Cedex 06
Tél. +33 (0)1 8394 5849
http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte
-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

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v8UAnjMGFO7uQMtBIb89Xn+peq5fBfif
=RDtS
-END PGP SIGNATURE-


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/9/4 François Patte francois.pa...@mi.parisdescartes.fr:
 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1

 Le 03/09/2012 20:16, Zdenek Wagner a écrit :
 2012/9/3 Javier Bezos lis...@tex-tipografia.com:
 François,


 Some times ago, I read that babel will be compatible with
 xelatex.

 I would like to use babel with french and sanskrit languages, do
  I have any chance to succeed?

 Maintainig babel is important for (pdf)latex which is still in use
 but for XeLaTeX I would suggest polyglossia which already works.

 Dear Zednek,

 Thank you for all these information about sanskrit (I knew some but
 others are useful). My main problem is French: babel French is really a
 very good help for French typography while French with polyglossia is
 very poor!

That's bad news! I thought that François Charette implemented French
in Polyglossia well. What is missing? Maybe it could be implemented
fast. And are there good OpenType fonts for French? I know that French
uses tiny spaces preceding double punctuation. This is a similar case
as in Hindi where some spaces are used in front of question marks and
exclamation marks (I found it i some article written by an Indian
typographer). IMHO it should be a property of a font, not of a
typesetting system. GNU FreeFont already contains such language
features. Probably Steve White would know how to implement
Language=French so that colons, semicolons, question and exclamation
marks had proper French spacing.

 If I could find somewhere a Rosetta stone to translate babel French
 into polyglossia French, I certainly try to make this translation!

 As for Devanagary script, I don't know FreeSerif fonts, I'll try them. I
 presently use Velthuis fonts with the devnag preprocessor.

You would like FreeSerif because its Devanagari block is derived
directly from the Velthuis PFB files.

 Thanks again.

 F.P.

 - --
 François Patte
 UFR de mathématiques et informatique
 Laboratoire MAP5 --- UMR CNRS 8145
 Université Paris Descartes
 45, rue des Saints Pères
 F-75270 Paris Cedex 06
 Tél. +33 (0)1 8394 5849
 http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte
 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
 Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
 Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

 iEYEARECAAYFAlBFs98ACgkQdE6C2dhV2JVb8wCfT3T31yFv7r7Wm6k1uRZ3tV1I
 v8UAnjMGFO7uQMtBIb89Xn+peq5fBfif
 =RDtS
 -END PGP SIGNATURE-


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/9/4 Philip TAYLOR p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk:


 Zdenek Wagner wrote:

 I know that French uses tiny spaces preceding double punctuation.
 IMHO it should be a property of a font, not of a typesetting system.


 Presumably you mean a user-selectable property rather than a static
 property (one would not want to have to switch font in order to change
 language, in most cases).  But does this not then suggest that every
 extant Western font would have to be modified to include this optional
 feature, f such fonts are to be used for French)   Surely, on that last
 basis alone, a font-independent solution is to be preferred.

Not the font, only the language. Here luatex has an advantage that
such features can be injected via lua without changing the font (if
you know how to do it). I prefer this way because active characters
may break some macros, eg a macro may expect an argument delimited
with : with category 12 but if it is made active for French
typesetting, this macro will not work. Some languages in babel make ^
active so that \^ could be input in an easier way. In such a case ^^ab
does not work. TeX requires two characters of category 7. The
definition of active ^ is quite clever and expands to ^ with category
7 in math. However, ^^ab is processed in TeX's mouth, expansion of the
active ^ occurs too late, thus it is not easy to handle it on the
macro level. That's why I do not like active characters, mere adding a
babel module for another language may break the document. However,
sometimes active characters cannot be avoided and sometimes they make
life easier.

 Incidentally, thinspace before tall punctuation was also common in
 British typography until a few decades ago, and some typesetters who
 care still follow the same convention.  To my eye, it is far more
 pleasant than the crowded punctuation that is only too common these
 days.

I found it in some old Czech books but it was thinner than in French.

 Philip Taylor



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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Tue, 4 Sep 2012 11:45:53 +0200 schrieb Zdenek Wagner:


 Here luatex has an advantage that
 such features can be injected via lua without changing the font (if
 you know how to do it). I prefer this way because active characters
 may break some macros, eg a macro may expect an argument delimited
 with : with category 12 but if it is made active for French
 typesetting, this macro will not work. 

The current version of frenchb.ldf
(http://daniel.flipo.free.fr/frenchb/) doesn't make punctuation
chars like :  active when xetex is used, it then use (like
polyglossia) \XeTeXinterchartoks to adjust the spacing. So babel +
frenchb is already adapted to pdflatex *and* xelatex.

With lualatex one can also use microtype to adjust the spacing, see
e.g. here
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/64591/automatically-adding-space-before-punctuation-in-old-style-english-texts/64609#64609
 
If someone would suggest this to Daniel he perhaps could implement
it. 

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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/9/4 Philip TAYLOR p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk:
 I am confused, Zdeněk :


 Zdenek Wagner wrote:


 Not the font, only the language.


 but in your earlier message you wrote IMHO it should be a property of a
 font, not of a typesetting system.

 So I am not at all clear what you are advocating : are you saying that
 it should be

 (a) a static property of any font to be used exclusively for French
 (b) a dynamic (user-selectable)  property of any font to be used
 non-exclusively for French
 (c) a property of a language, as defined by packages such as Babel
 or Polyglossia, or
 (d) something else ?

Language feature of a font.

 I pass over the discussion on active characters (because those problems
 are well understood) and on LuaTeX (because I would like a solution
 that can be used with XeTeX).

As Ulrike wrote, \XeTeXinterchartoks is a nice feature. It can solve
various problems without having active characters.

 ** Phil.



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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Philip TAYLOR]

Zdenek Wagner wrote:


Language feature of a font.


OK, now understood, but this does not address my concern
regarding the countless extant fonts that do not have
such a feature.  Would it not be better to postulate
a solution that can be used with any extant font ?

** Phil.


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/9/4 Philip TAYLOR p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk:


 Zdenek Wagner wrote:

 Language feature of a font.


 OK, now understood, but this does not address my concern
 regarding the countless extant fonts that do not have
 such a feature.  Would it not be better to postulate
 a solution that can be used with any extant font ?

My point is that if it were done in the font, it would be done once
and could be used not only in TeX but also in other programs as
Scribus, InDesign etc. If the font designer were a good typographer,
the spaces could be tuned to match the font. I think that Computer
Modern needs larger spaces than Times Roman and there are even more
condensed fonts. Thus the font designer could do it better. For me TeX
solution is for the case that the feature is not implemented in the
font. And it is good that it can be done in TeX. The ideal system
should allow users to switch between using font features and macros.
If the system offered inserting features dynamically without requiring
users to understand font internals, it would be even better.

 ** Phil.



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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/9/4 Philip TAYLOR p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk:


 Zdenek Wagner wrote:

 If the system offered inserting features dynamically without requiring
 users to understand font internals, it would be even better.


 Hear hear.  As one who sits only on the edge of typography and
 ?fontography?, I find the present XeTeX interface almost unusable,
 requiring (as it currently does) a detailed knowledge of font
 internals if one is to derive maximum benefit from the
 available font features.  If the interface were more abstract,
 and accessible to those who understand what they want to achieve
 but not how any extant font might help them in achieving that
 goal, I believe that that would be an enormous step forwards.

 ** Phil.

Yes, this is the biggest problem. The experts say that the OpenType
specification itself is not clearly written. Thus different shapers
implement various features in a different way and thus it may happen
that a font works fine in one program but not in another. I know that
various features are available but I can only use some of them. I
cannot even find which features are available in the font. I can
display some information using otfinfo but I do not understand the
output.


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Philip TAYLOR]

Zdenek Wagner wrote:


If the system offered inserting features dynamically without requiring
users to understand font internals, it would be even better.


Hear hear.  As one who sits only on the edge of typography and 
?fontography?, I find the present XeTeX interface almost unusable,

requiring (as it currently does) a detailed knowledge of font
internals if one is to derive maximum benefit from the
available font features.  If the interface were more abstract,
and accessible to those who understand what they want to achieve
but not how any extant font might help them in achieving that
goal, I believe that that would be an enormous step forwards.

** Phil.


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Javier Bezos]

Maintainig babel is important for (pdf)latex which is still in use but
for XeLaTeX I would suggest polyglossia which already works.


I would add the new version of babel won't make things to
work automagically. Rather it will provide some tools to
ease making language files compatible with xetex and luatex.

And to seize the opportunity... Please, could you give me
examples of (minimal) documents with babel not working
with XeTeX?

Javier


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[XeTeX] babel

[François Patte]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Bonjour,

Some times ago, I read that babel will be compatible with xelatex.

I would like to use babel with french and sanskrit languages, do I have
any chance to succeed?

Thanks for information.
- -- 
François Patte
UFR de mathématiques et informatique
Laboratoire MAP5 --- UMR CNRS 8145
Université Paris Descartes
45, rue des Saints Pères
F-75270 Paris Cedex 06
Tél. +33 (0)1 8394 5849
http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte
-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iEYEARECAAYFAlBEz8kACgkQdE6C2dhV2JX9qwCfefXA6CJSKzzoDXNgTTwEm3Um
uoAAniCGDMD47tlakPm8khFTHaraYhvQ
=3HCh
-END PGP SIGNATURE-


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Javier Bezos]

François,


Some times ago, I read that babel will be compatible with xelatex.

I would like to use babel with french and sanskrit languages, do I have
any chance to succeed?


Not yet -- I'm still working on it. For further info, see:

http://www.tex-tipografia.com/babel_news.html

An advance of the new manual is:

http://www.latex-project.org/svnroot/latex2e-public/required/babel/babel.pdf

Javier


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Re: [XeTeX] babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/9/3 Javier Bezos lis...@tex-tipografia.com:
 François,


 Some times ago, I read that babel will be compatible with xelatex.

 I would like to use babel with french and sanskrit languages, do I have
 any chance to succeed?

Maintainig babel is important for (pdf)latex which is still in use but
for XeLaTeX I would suggest polyglossia which already works. You can
input the Devanagari text either directly in UTF-8 or in a
transliteration (including Velthuis) using the xetex-devanagari
package. You can request transliteration from Velthuis by
Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit (Mapping=velthuis is used for Hindi, you
will have to write explicitly viramas after the final consonants).
There are several Devanagari fonts available, for instance Nakula and
Sahadeva by John Smith or GNU FreeFont. You need at least release
20120503, in older releases the Devanagari block is incorrect. This
release is already packaged in TeX Live 2012. Devanagari in FreeSans
is derived from Gargi, thus it does not contain all Sanskrit
conjuncts, FreeSerif contains Velthuis glyphs. When the font is
loaded, it even obeys switching Language=Sanskrit and Language=Hindi
(the latter coresponding to the @modernhindi instruction in devnag).
Moreover, GNU FreeFont is most probably the only font with correct
spacing of Devanagari punctuation. I would certainly use Polyglossia +
GNU FreeSerif in XeLaTeX.


 Not yet -- I'm still working on it. For further info, see:

 http://www.tex-tipografia.com/babel_news.html

 An advance of the new manual is:

 http://www.latex-project.org/svnroot/latex2e-public/required/babel/babel.pdf

 Javier



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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Keith J. Schultz]

Hi Kiddies,

I am getting a good laugh with this thread!

Yes, there are caveats to the arguments.

The important thing is that there is someone/ a team that is willing
to improve the behavior of Babel and maybe teaching it some new tricks
while not breaking it! The benefits may only be for a few of interest.

The most important thing is that Babe lis not broken. 

Let's just sit back and is what happens!

regards
Keith.



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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Vafa Khalighi]

Is there a mailing list/development repository for babel?


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

 Do you want to say that Leslie Lamport lied when stating that LaTeX
 (even v. 2.09) is international? Do you want to say that the babel

Many years ago a friend of mine prepared his MSc thesis using
nroff and the text he was setting was Greek. Does this mean
that people should maintain nroff? Does this mean that people
should continue using nroff? As far it regards, Lamport I don't
think he created LaTeX for people who prepare documents in
languages other than English. The same applies to TeX itself.
Knuth just added 8-bit support to enable support for 
languages that use the Latin alphabet. 



 authors used to lie us? Do you want to say that LaTeX cannot be used
 for non-English languages? Well, I used it to typeset Czech, Russian

The correct term is for languages that do not use the Latin
alphabet and although I am one of these authors, I do say
that it is a mistake to update babel. This package is 
history and no one should update it. It should remain
there only for those poor souls who can't or don't want to
upgrade their old source files. 

 German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Classical Greek, Modern
 Greek, French, Plattdeutsh, Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese, Mongolian,


Try to write Greek with babel and with XeTeX: babal is just pain in
@$$ whilst XeLaTeX simply rocks! Do you understand now what I am
saying?

 time by converting various symbols to macros. But do not tell me that
 LaTeX is unsuitable for multilingual processing because it is not
 true. I hope that the list of languages given above is large enough.


It is unsuitable because it was not designed to be so! Typesetting
Greek demands Greek fonts encoded in some stupid and archaic
encoding and the use of some transliteration encoding files.
If you call this suitable, then I simply rest my case! Otherwise,
just admit that TeX is unsuitable for multilingual typesetting and
babel should remain there for reasons of backwards compatibility and 
that's all. 

A.S.
--
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Xanthi, Greece



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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Khaled Hosny]

On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 12:33:48AM -0700, Apostolos Syropoulos wrote:
 Try to write Greek with babel and with XeTeX: babal is just pain in
 @$$ whilst XeLaTeX simply rocks! Do you understand now what I am
 saying?

You are comparing apples and oranges here.



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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

  Try to write Greek with babel and with XeTeX: babal is just pain in
  @$$ whilst XeLaTeX simply rocks! Do you understand now what I am
  saying?
 
 You are comparing apples and oranges here.


You think so? OK, I can live with this kind
of critique.


A.S.

 
--
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Xanthi, Greece



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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com:
 German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Classical Greek, Modern
 Greek, French, Plattdeutsh, Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese, Mongolian,


 Try to write Greek with babel and with XeTeX: babal is just pain in
 @$$ whilst XeLaTeX simply rocks! Do you understand now what I am
 saying?

It is not a big difference for me. I know Greek alphabet because it is
used in math but such knowledge is not sufficient to type the Greek
text as quickly as I can do int in languages that I know at least a
little (Czech, Slovak, Polish, English, Danish, Norwegian, Hindi).
When typesetting the text in Greek I got it from its author written in
the Symbol font and monotoniko accents marked with a pencil on a
printout. I wrote a simple program to convert it to transliteration
for use with LaTeX. The author of the text was ill, so he sent a
student to me to do proof-reading. The student saw TeX for the first
time in her life, yet she was able to understand the transliteration
within a few seconds and type anything that was necessary to correct.
Thus it seems that it is not that clumsy. At that time there was no
unicode support in text editors, so there was no other option. A few
year ago I had to insert one sentence from the New Testament. It can
be found on the web. I decided to install the Athena font and use
XeLaTeX so tha I can simply copypaste the sentence from the web to
gvim.

 time by converting various symbols to macros. But do not tell me that
 LaTeX is unsuitable for multilingual processing because it is not
 true. I hope that the list of languages given above is large enough.


 It is unsuitable because it was not designed to be so! Typesetting
 Greek demands Greek fonts encoded in some stupid and archaic
 encoding and the use of some transliteration encoding files.
 If you call this suitable, then I simply rest my case! Otherwise,
 just admit that TeX is unsuitable for multilingual typesetting and
 babel should remain there for reasons of backwards compatibility and
 that's all.

All the above listed languages were used in a single book and the DVI
was created by a single LaTeX run. It was not easy to combine
everything will all encodings and be sure that active characters will
not cause problems, but it was not that difficult. The biggest problem
was to find all characters for Mongolian and Ewe, because at that time
they were not available in the fonts. I had to create them.

Now XeTeX solves a lot of problems, active characters and weird macros
are not needed. Yet there are users in India who prefer to use
Velthuis Devanagari + old LaTeX + Babel. The basic definitions can be
almost shared between Babel and Polyglossia. I already have the Babel
module for Hindi, so I do not see any reaso why to stop its supports
if they are still users who demand it. I am happy that there is a
person to whom I can send my work and have it added to the official
version of Babel.

 A.S.
 --
 Apostolos Syropoulos
 Xanthi, Greece



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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Khaled Hosny]

On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 03:19:16AM -0700, Apostolos Syropoulos wrote:
   Try to write Greek with babel and with XeTeX: babal is just pain in
   @$$ whilst XeLaTeX simply rocks! Do you understand now what I am
   saying?
  
  You are comparing apples and oranges here.
 
 
 You think so? OK, I can live with this kind
 of critique.

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.

Regards,
 Khaled


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

 
 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.
 

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Xanthi, Greece




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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Khaled Hosny]

On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 06:33:03AM -0700, Apostolos Syropoulos wrote:
 
 
  
  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. 

No, that is not obvious to me given that nothing inherent in Babel that
prevents it from working with (and taking advantage of) new engines,
just like LaTeX does (the so called XeLaTeX is just the plain old LaTeX
with few trivial adaptations for XeTeX, it is not like we are talking
about a completely new format here).

If you think LaTeX is too archaic and should be put in museum (I do),
that is a different story.

Regards,
 Khaled


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

 
 If you think LaTeX is too archaic and should be put in museum (I do),
 that is a different story.
 


At least we agree to something! In addition, I feel that we need to get
rid of many other programs, macro-packages, etc. For example, there is
absolutely no reason to maintain XDVI. 


A.S.

 
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Xanthi, Greece



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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Juan Francisco Fraile Vicente]

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 asyropou...@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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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[John Was]

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.

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 asyropou...@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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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/5/4 John Was john@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 asyropou...@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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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Jan Foniok]

 If you think LaTeX is too archaic and should be put in museum (I do),
 that is a different story.
 
 
 
 At least we agree to something! In addition, I feel that we need to get
 rid of many other programs, macro-packages, etc. For example, there is
 absolutely no reason to maintain XDVI. 
 A.S.

Telling other people what they should maintain and what they *must* abandon 
feels very arrogant. Why should a certain A.S. decide what is worth the effort 
and what is not?

Jan Foniok


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[John Was]

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...


John





- Original Message - 
From: Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wag...@gmail.com

To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms xetex@tug.org
Sent: 04 May 2012 16:11
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Babel


2012/5/4 John Was john@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

Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

 
 Telling other people what they should maintain and what they *must* abandon 
 feels very arrogant. Why should a certain A.S. decide what is worth the 
 effort 
 and what is not?
 

Arrogant in what way? Have you ever tried to compile the TeX tree? In many
cases people have to invent stupid patches just to support an almost
useless program in a modern computing environment. As about the rest, I 
will not make any comment.

A.S.


--
Apostolos Syropoulos
Xanthi, Greece



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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/5/4 John Was john@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.wag...@gmail.com
 To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms xetex@tug.org
 Sent: 04 May 2012 16:11
 Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Babel



 2012/5/4 John Was john@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

Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com:

 Telling other people what they should maintain and what they *must* abandon
 feels very arrogant. Why should a certain A.S. decide what is worth the 
 effort
 and what is not?


 Arrogant in what way? Have you ever tried to compile the TeX tree? In many
 cases people have to invent stupid patches just to support an almost

Don't you feel yourself in a loop? If they patch it, they apparently
want to use it and if they want to use it, it is not useless for them
because if it were useless, they would not use it and thus they would
have no reason to patch it.

 useless program in a modern computing environment. As about the rest, I
 will not make any comment.

If the modern computer environment does not offer important features
that were implemented in the old environment decades and still work,
than (at least for me) it is natural to use the old environment.

 A.S.


 --
 Apostolos Syropoulos
 Xanthi, Greece



 --
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Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Javier Bezos]

El 04/05/2012 9:24, Vafa Khalighi escribió:


Is there a mailing list/development repository for babel?


Sure. The repository is on:

http://www.latex-project.org/svnroot/latex2e-public/required/babel/

Until now, there are only changes in the test files.

As to the mailing list, I'm not sure. There is the latex-l
list, but it's intended mainly for LaTeX3, and babel is a
LaTeX2e (and Plain) thing, but after cleaning up babel there
will be very likely further work on a new multilingual core
for LaTeX3, and I presume discussing babel will be ok.

Remember what I said in my first post -- as far as babel
is concerned, the goal is mainly to fix bugs, to make babel
compatible with XeTeX and LuaTeX (and just that) and perhaps
to add a few minor features, that's all, because a new core
is clearly necessary. Work on the latter, however, will
start later and not right now -- understanding better the
problems in babel will help in the development of the new
core.

Javier


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[John Was]

I think it's arrogant in the strict sense that you arrogate to yourself the 
right to tell others what tasks they should or should not be engaging in, 
and you characterize the activity of those persisting in the tasks you would 
like to prohibit as 'stupid' (as in your most recent contribution).  I know 
that it was naive of the generation before mine to think that a successfully 
fought world war would put an end to this kind of controlling attitude, 
which is regrettably as prevalent today as it ever was, but I would have 
hoped to avoid encountering it in a TeX forum!



John

- Original Message - 
From: Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com

To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms xetex@tug.org
Sent: 04 May 2012 16:35
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Babel




Telling other people what they should maintain and what they *must* 
abandon
feels very arrogant. Why should a certain A.S. decide what is worth the 
effort

and what is not?



Arrogant in what way? Have you ever tried to compile the TeX tree? In many
cases people have to invent stupid patches just to support an almost
useless program in a modern computing environment. As about the rest, I
will not make any comment.

A.S.


--
Apostolos Syropoulos
Xanthi, Greece



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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Joseph Wright]

On 04/05/2012 17:48, Javier Bezos wrote:
 As to the mailing list, I'm not sure. There is the latex-l
 list, but it's intended mainly for LaTeX3, and babel is a
 LaTeX2e (and Plain) thing, but after cleaning up babel there
 will be very likely further work on a new multilingual core
 for LaTeX3, and I presume discussing babel will be ok.

My understanding is that LaTeX-L is for 'LaTeX core' discussion, which
covers LaTeX2e, LaTeX3, 'required', 'tools', etc. The fact that LaTeX2e
is not changing means that there not much to say, but there is
occasionally something. As you say, babel material would be useful for
thinking about the issues for LaTeX3 too.
--
Joseph Wright


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

 
 Don't you feel yourself in a loop? If they patch it, they apparently
 want to use it and if they want to use it, it is not useless for them
 because if it were useless, they would not use it and thus they would
 have no reason to patch it.
 


No! The problem is that people should start saying that certain parts
of the old TeX world are irrelevant and so they should not be part
of any TeX distribution. For example, on a set of recently compiled
binaries I see the following:

apostolo@nadya ./tex
This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2012/dev)
**^D
! End of file on the terminal... why?
apostolo@nadya ./pdftex
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012/dev)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
**^C


The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can
do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can
get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files. 


 If the modern computer environment does not offer important features
 that were implemented in the old environment decades and still work,
 than (at least for me) it is natural to use the old environment.

That is called conservatism, that is, something against progress...

A.S.

--
Apostolos Syropoulos
Xanthi, Greece




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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

 
 I think it's arrogant in the strict sense that you arrogate to yourself the 
 right to tell others what tasks they should or should not be engaging in, and 
 you characterize the activity of those persisting in the tasks you would like 
 to 
 prohibit as 'stupid' (as in your most recent contribution).  I know that 
 it was naive of the generation before mine to think that a successfully 
 fought 
 world war would put an end to this kind of controlling attitude, which is 
                                             ^     

Well I think you have crossed the line! I think it makes no sense to argue
with you.


A.S.

--
Apostolos Syropoulos
Xanthi, Greece




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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Martin Schröder]

2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com:
 No! The problem is that people should start saying that certain parts
 of the old TeX world are irrelevant and so they should not be part
 of any TeX distribution. For example, on a set of recently compiled

You don't understand the idea of TeX/LaTeX: A stable system that can
be used ad eternam.

 The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can

Because DEK uses his TeX, not Thanh's pdfTeX.

 do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can
 get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files.

These are _not_ useless for a certain someone in Stanford.

Best
   Martin


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Herbert Schulz]

On May 4, 2012, at 1:26 PM, Apostolos Syropoulos wrote:

 
 Don't you feel yourself in a loop? If they patch it, they apparently
 want to use it and if they want to use it, it is not useless for them
 because if it were useless, they would not use it and thus they would
 have no reason to patch it.
 
 
 
 No! The problem is that people should start saying that certain parts
 of the old TeX world are irrelevant and so they should not be part
 of any TeX distribution. For example, on a set of recently compiled
 binaries I see the following:
 
 apostolo@nadya ./tex
 This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2012/dev)
 **^D
 ! End of file on the terminal... why?
 apostolo@nadya ./pdftex
 This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012/dev)
  restricted \write18 enabled.
 **^C
 
 
 The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can
 do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can
 get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files. 
 


Howdy,

I hesitate jumping into this discussion but one reason to retain 
tex-dvi-ps-pdf is that pdftex can't include eps figures by default. That 
said, recent versions of pdftex using the graphicx package can use epstopdf 
(which uses Ghostscript?) to convert eps-pdf on the fly unless you have your 
system set to ``paranoid'' mode.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)






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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com:

 Don't you feel yourself in a loop? If they patch it, they apparently
 want to use it and if they want to use it, it is not useless for them
 because if it were useless, they would not use it and thus they would
 have no reason to patch it.



 No! The problem is that people should start saying that certain parts
 of the old TeX world are irrelevant and so they should not be part
 of any TeX distribution. For example, on a set of recently compiled
 binaries I see the following:

 apostolo@nadya ./tex
 This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2012/dev)
 **^D
 ! End of file on the terminal... why?
 apostolo@nadya ./pdftex
 This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012/dev)
  restricted \write18 enabled.
 **^C


 The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can
 do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can
 get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files.

This is because you invoke pdfetex under the name tex, in other works,
you ask pdfetex to forget pdf output and e-TeX extensions and behave
as the old Knuth's TeX. Thus pdfetex does nothing but responds exactly
with what you asked for.

 If the modern computer environment does not offer important features
 that were implemented in the old environment decades and still work,
 than (at least for me) it is natural to use the old environment.

 That is called conservatism, that is, something against progress...

 A.S.

 --
 Apostolos Syropoulos
 Xanthi, Greece




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http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Khaled Hosny]

On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 09:44:22PM +0200, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
 2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com:
  The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can
  do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can
  get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files.
 
 This is because you invoke pdfetex under the name tex, in other works,
 you ask pdfetex to forget pdf output and e-TeX extensions and behave
 as the old Knuth's TeX. Thus pdfetex does nothing but responds exactly
 with what you asked for.

The `tex` binary in TL is Knuth's vanilla¹ TeX, not pdftex nor etex.

¹ not counting extensions like encTeX, MLTeX and other web2c changes



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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Diederick C. Niehorster]

Hi Vafa,

Can your fixes be ported to upstream (that is babel itself)? That
reduces the amount of code you have to maintain as things get fixed at
the source. For some parts of bidi, that should be the ultimate aim
anyway I guess?

Best,
Dee

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 9:02 PM, Vafa Khalighi simurg...@gmail.com wrote:
 OK but I do not want to give you too much work. Let me know when you fix
 these and I send you more then.


 On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 3:12 AM, Javier Bezos lis...@tex-tipografia.com
 wrote:

 El 02/05/2012 18:29, Vafa Khalighi escribió:


 I can send you lots more, if you want to fix these.


 Thanks. You may send them to me directly, if you want.


 Javier


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Vafa Khalighi]

bidi is LPPL. You can borrow codes from bidi (and I do not  mind if you
take code from bidi and do not mention it comes from bidi) but I have no
plan to remove any code from bidi package. My aim, at least, is to make it
as stable as it can be.

On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 12:04 AM, Diederick C. Niehorster
dcni...@gmail.comwrote:

 Hi Vafa,

 Can your fixes be ported to upstream (that is babel itself)? That
 reduces the amount of code you have to maintain as things get fixed at
 the source. For some parts of bidi, that should be the ultimate aim
 anyway I guess?

 Best,
 Dee

 On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 9:02 PM, Vafa Khalighi simurg...@gmail.com wrote:
  OK but I do not want to give you too much work. Let me know when you fix
  these and I send you more then.
 
 
  On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 3:12 AM, Javier Bezos lis...@tex-tipografia.com
  wrote:
 
  El 02/05/2012 18:29, Vafa Khalighi escribió:
 
 
  I can send you lots more, if you want to fix these.
 
 
  Thanks. You may send them to me directly, if you want.
 
 
  Javier
 
 
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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

 I am a scientist, TeX is not my primary job, it is a hobby that I use

So you are a scientist and others are what? Idiots?

 use as my hobby. I cannot tell my customers, please, wait a year or
 so, I have to develop a new piece of software. Both in science and

That is your problem! Not mine, and certainly not a problem of this community!

 private commercial work I am supposed to have results. I cannot wait
 until new software is available, I _must_ use existing tools that
 allow me to create required results. I also have an archive of old


Then use them, but please do not ask for updates! People should not
waste their precious time with outdated tools and packages. 


A.S.


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Martin Schröder]

2012/5/3 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com:
 Then use them, but please do not ask for updates! People should not
 waste their precious time with outdated tools and packages.

Babel is the LaTeX standard for multilingual texts. Until something
else takes it's place, it must be maintained.

Best
   Martin


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

 
 Babel is the LaTeX standard for multilingual texts. Until something
 else takes it's place, it must be maintained.
 
 
For LaTeX not XeLaTeX! And LaTeX is not the standard for multilingual
typesetting. 
A.S.


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/5/3 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com:
 I am a scientist, TeX is not my primary job, it is a hobby that I use

 So you are a scientist and others are what? Idiots?

Have I written anything like that? You have written that development
of indic scripts support in luatex is a job for a student for master
thesis. I have asked whether you have such a student and offered help
and testing the Devanagari script.

 use as my hobby. I cannot tell my customers, please, wait a year or
 so, I have to develop a new piece of software. Both in science and

 That is your problem! Not mine, and certainly not a problem of this community!

 private commercial work I am supposed to have results. I cannot wait
 until new software is available, I _must_ use existing tools that
 allow me to create required results. I also have an archive of old


 Then use them, but please do not ask for updates! People should not
 waste their precious time with outdated tools and packages.

Who declared babel outdated? I have not seen such a statement. And if
I submit a patch improving things in babel, will I be wrong?

I do appreciate work of authors of all TeX components, I appreciate
the work of TeX Live maintainers, even the work of Thjomas Esser for
teTeX that is no longer maintain, the work of Eberhard Mattes for his
excellent emTeX that was my first TeX distribution, Jun Sawataishi for
OS/2 port of teTeX (I cannot name all people here). The continuous
development ensures that what I created with emTeX on DOS or OS/2 20
years ago can now be processed with TeX Live on Linux.

 A.S.


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/5/3 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com:

 Babel is the LaTeX standard for multilingual texts. Until something
 else takes it's place, it must be maintained.


 For LaTeX not XeLaTeX! And LaTeX is not the standard for multilingual
 typesetting.

Do you want to say that Leslie Lamport lied when stating that LaTeX
(even v. 2.09) is international? Do you want to say that the babel
authors used to lie us? Do you want to say that LaTeX cannot be used
for non-English languages? Well, I used it to typeset Czech, Russian,
German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Classical Greek, Modern
Greek, French, Plattdeutsh, Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese, Mongolian,
Polish, Upper Sorbian, Romanian, Hungarian, Hindi, Ewe, Turkish,
Latin, Esperanto, all in LaTeX2e.

I know that babel solves things that need not be handled at macro
level in XeTeX, that's why polyglossia was invented. I now that XeTeX
simplifies work with truetype and opentype fonts. I am glad to have
XeTeX. I should also mention that XML documents can be transformed by
XSLT to a TeX source that can easily be processed by XeLaTeX because I
can keep everything in UTF-8 and using a proper font I need not waste
time by converting various symbols to macros. But do not tell me that
LaTeX is unsuitable for multilingual processing because it is not
true. I hope that the list of languages given above is large enough.

 A.S.


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[XeTeX] Babel

[Javier Bezos]

Hi all,

Babel gets back on track and it is again actively maintained. The
goals are mainly to fix bugs, to make it compatible with XeTeX and
LuaTeX (as far as possible), and perhaps to add some minor new
features (provided they are backward compatible).

No attempt will be done to take full advantage of the features
provided by XeTeX and LuaTeX, which would require a completely
new core (as for example polyglossia or as part of LaTeX3).

Your comments or suggestions (or questions!) are welcomed.

Javier


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Arthur Reutenauer]

  Javier, that's great news!  I suppose you're part of the team
developing it?

  Glad to see the ball gets rolling again for Babel.

Arthur


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Vafa Khalighi]

babel can use bidi package for its bidirectional typesetting rather than
its own (rlbabel.def) which has too many problems.

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Javier Bezos lis...@tex-tipografia.comwrote:

 Hi all,

 Babel gets back on track and it is again actively maintained. The
 goals are mainly to fix bugs, to make it compatible with XeTeX and
 LuaTeX (as far as possible), and perhaps to add some minor new
 features (provided they are backward compatible).

 No attempt will be done to take full advantage of the features
 provided by XeTeX and LuaTeX, which would require a completely
 new core (as for example polyglossia or as part of LaTeX3).

 Your comments or suggestions (or questions!) are welcomed.

 Javier


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Khaled Hosny]

And bidi, which rewrites half texmf/tex/latex/* tree is problem free :)

On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 04:59:02PM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
 babel can use bidi package for its bidirectional typesetting rather than its
 own (rlbabel.def) which has too many problems.
 
 On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Javier Bezos lis...@tex-tipografia.com 
 wrote:
 
 Hi all,
 
 Babel gets back on track and it is again actively maintained. The
 goals are mainly to fix bugs, to make it compatible with XeTeX and
 LuaTeX (as far as possible), and perhaps to add some minor new
 features (provided they are backward compatible).
 
 No attempt will be done to take full advantage of the features
 provided by XeTeX and LuaTeX, which would require a completely
 new core (as for example polyglossia or as part of LaTeX3).
 
 Your comments or suggestions (or questions!) are welcomed.
 
 Javier
 
 
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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

 
 No attempt will be done to take full advantage of the features
 provided by XeTeX and LuaTeX, which would require a completely
 new core (as for example polyglossia or as part of LaTeX3).
 
 Your comments or suggestions (or questions!) are welcomed.
 

IMHO it is better to have on good project instead of two or three bad
projects. babel served well the LaTeX community but Ι don't see
why it should be updated? And please, no one doing serious work
in languages other than English should consider using TeX! 

A.S.

  

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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Vafa Khalighi]

if you do not like it, do not use it. Simple!

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 11:59 PM, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org wrote:

 And bidi, which rewrites half texmf/tex/latex/* tree is problem free :)

 On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 04:59:02PM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
  babel can use bidi package for its bidirectional typesetting rather than
 its
  own (rlbabel.def) which has too many problems.
 
  On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Javier Bezos lis...@tex-tipografia.com
 wrote:
 
  Hi all,
 
  Babel gets back on track and it is again actively maintained. The
  goals are mainly to fix bugs, to make it compatible with XeTeX and
  LuaTeX (as far as possible), and perhaps to add some minor new
  features (provided they are backward compatible).
 
  No attempt will be done to take full advantage of the features
  provided by XeTeX and LuaTeX, which would require a completely
  new core (as for example polyglossia or as part of LaTeX3).
 
  Your comments or suggestions (or questions!) are welcomed.
 
  Javier
 
 
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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[José Carlos Santos]

On 02-05-2012 15:01, Apostolos Syropoulos wrote:


IMHO it is better to have on good project instead of two or three bad
projects. babel served well the LaTeX community but Ι don't see
why it should be updated? And please, no one doing serious work
in languages other than English should consider using TeX!


Why shouldn't I consider using TeX? (I am Portuguese, by the way.)

Best regards,

José Carlos Santos


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

 
 Why shouldn't I consider using TeX? (I am Portuguese, by the way.)
 


Because XeTeX and luaTeX do a far better job! First you don't
need tricks to use UTF-8 and you don't have to create zillions of
files to make a TrueType partially usable. Do you need more reasons?

A.S.

 
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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Khaled Hosny]

Sure, so please don't make it required by a base package like babel.

On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:02:29AM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
 if you do not like it, do not use it. Simple!
 
 On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 11:59 PM, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org wrote:
 
 And bidi, which rewrites half texmf/tex/latex/* tree is problem free :)
 
 On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 04:59:02PM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
  babel can use bidi package for its bidirectional typesetting rather than
 its
  own (rlbabel.def) which has too many problems.
 
  On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Javier Bezos lis...@tex-tipografia.com
 wrote:
 
      Hi all,
 
      Babel gets back on track and it is again actively maintained. The
      goals are mainly to fix bugs, to make it compatible with XeTeX and
      LuaTeX (as far as possible), and perhaps to add some minor new
      features (provided they are backward compatible).
 
      No attempt will be done to take full advantage of the features
      provided by XeTeX and LuaTeX, which would require a completely
      new core (as for example polyglossia or as part of LaTeX3).
 
      Your comments or suggestions (or questions!) are welcomed.
 
      Javier
 
 
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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Vafa Khalighi]

What are you talking about?

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 12:33 AM, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org wrote:

 Sure, so please don't make it required by a base package like babel.

 On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:02:29AM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
  if you do not like it, do not use it. Simple!
 
  On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 11:59 PM, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org
 wrote:
 
  And bidi, which rewrites half texmf/tex/latex/* tree is problem free
 :)
 
  On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 04:59:02PM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
   babel can use bidi package for its bidirectional typesetting
 rather than
  its
   own (rlbabel.def) which has too many problems.
  
   On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Javier Bezos 
 lis...@tex-tipografia.com
  wrote:
  
   Hi all,
  
   Babel gets back on track and it is again actively maintained.
 The
   goals are mainly to fix bugs, to make it compatible with XeTeX
 and
   LuaTeX (as far as possible), and perhaps to add some minor new
   features (provided they are backward compatible).
  
   No attempt will be done to take full advantage of the features
   provided by XeTeX and LuaTeX, which would require a completely
   new core (as for example polyglossia or as part of LaTeX3).
  
   Your comments or suggestions (or questions!) are welcomed.
  
   Javier
  
  
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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Khaled Hosny]

May be you should try reading what you are replying to, starting with
the quoted mails below (in the reverse order that resulted from your top
posting).

On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:38:00AM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
 What are you talking about?
 
 On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 12:33 AM, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org wrote:
 
 Sure, so please don't make it required by a base package like babel.
 
 On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:02:29AM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
  if you do not like it, do not use it. Simple!
 
  On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 11:59 PM, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org
 wrote:
 
      And bidi, which rewrites half texmf/tex/latex/* tree is problem free
 :)
 
      On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 04:59:02PM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
       babel can use bidi package for its bidirectional typesetting 
 rather
 than
      its
       own (rlbabel.def) which has too many problems.
      
       On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Javier Bezos 
 lis...@tex-tipografia.com
      wrote:
      
           Hi all,
      
           Babel gets back on track and it is again actively maintained.
 The
           goals are mainly to fix bugs, to make it compatible with XeTeX
 and
           LuaTeX (as far as possible), and perhaps to add some minor new
           features (provided they are backward compatible).
      
           No attempt will be done to take full advantage of the features
           provided by XeTeX and LuaTeX, which would require a completely
           new core (as for example polyglossia or as part of LaTeX3).
      
           Your comments or suggestions (or questions!) are welcomed.
      
           Javier
      
      
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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Javier Bezos]

Arthur,


   Javier, that's great news!  I suppose you're part of the team
developing it?


Yes, I am.

Javier


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/5/2 Apostolos Syropoulos asyropou...@yahoo.com:

 Why shouldn't I consider using TeX? (I am Portuguese, by the way.)



 Because XeTeX and luaTeX do a far better job! First you don't
 need tricks to use UTF-8 and you don't have to create zillions of
 files to make a TrueType partially usable. Do you need more reasons?

There are still good reasons why to use old TeX:

1. XeTeX does not support all microtypographical features.

2 LuaTeX does not support all scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi,
Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, ...)

Polyglossia does not yet work in LuaTeX, thus Babel is important.

 A.S.


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Vafa Khalighi]

That was not my point. The point was, if one person does not like a
package, it does not mean everyone else does not like it. BTW, based on
what Bezos said, I do not think there will be any changes to rlbabel.def.
bidi package is quite heaveily used and at least it is better/more complete
than any other package providing bidi support for etex based engines. One
should get familiar with the problems of bidirectional typesetting in etex
to appreciate what bidi does. Sorry, but you can not write 10 lines of TeX
code (just because you hate TeX coding) and believe falsely that things
will be fine.

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 1:10 AM, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org wrote:

 May be you should try reading what you are replying to, starting with
 the quoted mails below (in the reverse order that resulted from your top
 posting).

 On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:38:00AM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
  What are you talking about?
 
  On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 12:33 AM, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org
 wrote:
 
  Sure, so please don't make it required by a base package like babel.
 
  On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:02:29AM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
   if you do not like it, do not use it. Simple!
  
   On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 11:59 PM, Khaled Hosny 
 khaledho...@eglug.org
  wrote:
  
   And bidi, which rewrites half texmf/tex/latex/* tree is
 problem free
  :)
  
   On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 04:59:02PM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
babel can use bidi package for its bidirectional typesetting
 rather
  than
   its
own (rlbabel.def) which has too many problems.
   
On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Javier Bezos 
  lis...@tex-tipografia.com
   wrote:
   
Hi all,
   
Babel gets back on track and it is again actively
 maintained.
  The
goals are mainly to fix bugs, to make it compatible with
 XeTeX
  and
LuaTeX (as far as possible), and perhaps to add some
 minor new
features (provided they are backward compatible).
   
No attempt will be done to take full advantage of the
 features
provided by XeTeX and LuaTeX, which would require a
 completely
new core (as for example polyglossia or as part of
 LaTeX3).
   
Your comments or suggestions (or questions!) are
 welcomed.
   
Javier
   
   
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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Khaled Hosny]

I didn’t say it is bad or people should not be using it, but indirectly
claiming it is “problem-free” is very strong claim given how evasive it
is. 17000+ lines of code rewriting parts of a 100+ packages is not
something I’d force into people by making it a hard dependency of base
package like babel, no matter how useful it is as the whole approach is
fundamentally flawed and very fragile, this is IMO one of the very dark
sides of LaTeX.

On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 01:21:06AM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
 That was not my point. The point was, if one person does not like a package, 
 it
 does not mean everyone else does not like it. BTW, based on what Bezos said, I
 do not think there will be any changes to rlbabel.def. bidi package is quite
 heaveily used and at least it is better/more complete than any other package
 providing bidi support for etex based engines. One should get familiar with 
 the
 problems of bidirectional typesetting in etex to appreciate what bidi does.
 Sorry, but you can not write 10 lines of TeX code (just because you hate TeX
 coding) and believe falsely that things will be fine.
 
 On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 1:10 AM, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org wrote:
 
 May be you should try reading what you are replying to, starting with
 the quoted mails below (in the reverse order that resulted from your top
 posting).
 
 On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:38:00AM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
  What are you talking about?
 
  On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 12:33 AM, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org
 wrote:
 
      Sure, so please don't make it required by a base package like babel.
 
      On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:02:29AM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
       if you do not like it, do not use it. Simple!
      
       On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 11:59 PM, Khaled Hosny 
 khaledho...@eglug.org
      wrote:
      
           And bidi, which rewrites half texmf/tex/latex/* tree is 
 problem
 free
      :)
      
           On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 04:59:02PM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
            babel can use bidi package for its bidirectional typesetting
 rather
      than
           its
            own (rlbabel.def) which has too many problems.
           
            On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Javier Bezos 
      lis...@tex-tipografia.com
           wrote:
           
                Hi all,
           
                Babel gets back on track and it is again actively
 maintained.
      The
                goals are mainly to fix bugs, to make it compatible with
 XeTeX
      and
                LuaTeX (as far as possible), and perhaps to add some
 minor new
                features (provided they are backward compatible).
           
                No attempt will be done to take full advantage of the
 features
                provided by XeTeX and LuaTeX, which would require a
 completely
                new core (as for example polyglossia or as part of
 LaTeX3).
           
                Your comments or suggestions (or questions!) are
 welcomed.
           
                Javier
           
           
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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Javier Bezos]

babel can use bidi package for its bidirectional typesetting rather than
its own (rlbabel.def) which has too many problems.


Which ones? The LaTeX bugs database registers almost no bugs
related to bidirectional typesetting. Having information on
the problems are essential to fix them. Please, send bug
reports or explain the problems and the expected behaviour.

Javier




On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Javier Bezos lis...@tex-tipografia.com
mailto:lis...@tex-tipografia.com wrote:

Hi all,

Babel gets back on track and it is again actively maintained. The
goals are mainly to fix bugs, to make it compatible with XeTeX and
LuaTeX (as far as possible), and perhaps to add some minor new
features (provided they are backward compatible).

No attempt will be done to take full advantage of the features
provided by XeTeX and LuaTeX, which would require a completely
new core (as for example polyglossia or as part of LaTeX3).

Your comments or suggestions (or questions!) are welcomed.

Javier


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Vafa Khalighi]

So why bidi changes too many packages? maybe one simple example
demonstrates this:

try

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lettrine}
\makeatletter
\input{rlbabel.def}
\@rltrue
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\lettrine{L}{orem} Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and
typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy
text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type
and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only
five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining
essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of
Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with
desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of
Lorem Ipsum.
\end{document}

versus

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lettrine}
\usepackage[RTLdocument]{bidi}
\begin{document}
\lettrine{L}{orem} Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and
typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy
text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type
and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only
five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining
essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of
Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with
desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of
Lorem Ipsum.
\end{document}

and compare the output.



On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 1:21 AM, Vafa Khalighi simurg...@gmail.com wrote:

 That was not my point. The point was, if one person does not like a
 package, it does not mean everyone else does not like it. BTW, based on
 what Bezos said, I do not think there will be any changes to rlbabel.def.
 bidi package is quite heaveily used and at least it is better/more complete
 than any other package providing bidi support for etex based engines. One
 should get familiar with the problems of bidirectional typesetting in etex
 to appreciate what bidi does. Sorry, but you can not write 10 lines of TeX
 code (just because you hate TeX coding) and believe falsely that things
 will be fine.


 On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 1:10 AM, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.orgwrote:

 May be you should try reading what you are replying to, starting with
 the quoted mails below (in the reverse order that resulted from your top
 posting).

 On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:38:00AM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
  What are you talking about?
 
  On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 12:33 AM, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org
 wrote:
 
  Sure, so please don't make it required by a base package like babel.
 
  On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:02:29AM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
   if you do not like it, do not use it. Simple!
  
   On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 11:59 PM, Khaled Hosny 
 khaledho...@eglug.org
  wrote:
  
   And bidi, which rewrites half texmf/tex/latex/* tree is
 problem free
  :)
  
   On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 04:59:02PM +1000, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
babel can use bidi package for its bidirectional
 typesetting rather
  than
   its
own (rlbabel.def) which has too many problems.
   
On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Javier Bezos 
  lis...@tex-tipografia.com
   wrote:
   
Hi all,
   
Babel gets back on track and it is again actively
 maintained.
  The
goals are mainly to fix bugs, to make it compatible
 with XeTeX
  and
LuaTeX (as far as possible), and perhaps to add some
 minor new
features (provided they are backward compatible).
   
No attempt will be done to take full advantage of the
 features
provided by XeTeX and LuaTeX, which would require a
 completely
new core (as for example polyglossia or as part of
 LaTeX3).
   
Your comments or suggestions (or questions!) are
 welcomed.
   
Javier
   
   
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 http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
   
   
  
   
   
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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Vafa Khalighi]

 Which ones? The LaTeX bugs database registers almost no bugs
 related to bidirectional typesetting. Having information on
 the problems are essential to fix them. Please, send bug
 reports or explain the problems and the expected behaviour.

 Javier



Please read the archives of ivritex mailing list if you can see. I can tell
you few from the top of my heads. As an example:

try

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[RTLdocument]{bidi}
\begin{document}
\fbox{\begin{minipage}[b]{8cm}
\begin{itemize}
\item This is a test as you can see and this is a test that goes on and on
\end{itemize}
\end{minipage}}
\end{document}

versus

\documentclass{article}
\makeatletter
\input{rlbabel.def}
\@rltrue
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\fbox{\begin{minipage}[b]{8cm}
\begin{itemize}
\item This is a test as you can see and this is a test that goes on and on
\end{itemize}
\end{minipage}}
\end{document}

If you are interested, I can send the ones I know.


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Vafa Khalighi]

I did not say it is problem free. I exactly said babel can use bidi
package for its bidirectional typesetting rather than its own (rlbabel.def)
which has too many problems.. I only claimed that rlbabel.def has too many
problems and bidi does not have these. I do not see why this is strong. If
you have used both packages, you will realise that it is a reality not even
a claim. I did not force anyone to use anything, I only suggested. You
know, nothing is problem free, if you even write 5 lines of TeX code, it
would not be problem free.

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 1:33 AM, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.org wrote:

 I didn’t say it is bad or people should not be using it, but indirectly
 claiming it is “problem-free” is very strong claim given how evasive it
 is. 17000+ lines of code rewriting parts of a 100+ packages is not
 something I’d force into people by making it a hard dependency of base
 package like babel, no matter how useful it is as the whole approach is
 fundamentally flawed and very fragile, this is IMO one of the very dark
 sides of LaTeX.






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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Vafa Khalighi]

Another one:

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\makeatletter
\input{rlbabel.def}
\@rltrue
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\section{Test 1}
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the
1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to
make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but
also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.
It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets
containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing
software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the
1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to
make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but
also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.
It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets
containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing
software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the
1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to
make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but
also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.
It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets
containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing
software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
\section{Test 2}
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the
1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to
make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but
also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.
It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets
containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing
software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
\end{document}

Problem: left and right margins are not the same.

Expected Behaviour: use bidi package to see what expected behaviour is
(left and right margins should the same)

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 1:47 AM, Vafa Khalighi simurg...@gmail.com wrote:

 I did not say it is problem free. I exactly said babel can use bidi
 package for its bidirectional typesetting rather than its own (rlbabel.def)
 which has too many problems.. I only claimed that rlbabel.def has too many
 problems and bidi does not have these. I do not see why this is strong. If
 you have used both packages, you will realise that it is a reality not even
 a claim. I did not force anyone to use anything, I only suggested. You
 know, nothing is problem free, if you even write 5 lines of TeX code, it
 would not be problem free.


 On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 1:33 AM, Khaled Hosny khaledho...@eglug.orgwrote:

 I didn’t say it is bad or people should not be using it, but indirectly
 claiming it is “problem-free” is very strong claim given how evasive it
 is. 17000+ lines of code rewriting parts of a 100+ packages is not
 something I’d force into people by making it a hard dependency of base
 package like babel, no matter how useful it is as the whole approach is
 fundamentally flawed and very fragile, this is IMO one of the very dark
 sides of LaTeX.







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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Vafa Khalighi]

Another one:

\documentclass{article}
\makeatletter
\input{rlbabel.def}
\@rltrue
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\begin{equation}
1+2=3
\end{equation}
\begin{eqnarray}
1+2=3
\end{eqnarray}
\end{document}

Problem: first equation is on left, second equation on right.

Expected Behaviour: both equations should be on the same side. Preferably
on the right in this case.


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Re: [XeTeX] Babel

[Vafa Khalighi]

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/36982/babel-l-command-reverses-letters-inserts-symbol

and

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/24421/algorithmic-babel-with-hebrew-conflict-numbering-missing

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/32220/algorithmicx-conflicts-with-babel-with-hebrew

just search the web and you find lots of these (most likely to be found on
ivritex mailing list).


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