[XeTeX] "new-babel", was: Ancient Greek hyphenation

[Javier Bezos]

Hi all,

I'm just subscribed after a private message from Will.

[Will]
> Indeed...And anyone thinking of doing this should talk first with
> Javier Bezos, whose Mem (nee Lambda) package for Omega is designed
> for such a thing. The package is not available for XeTeX, but he's
> thought more about the problems than anyone.

Well, there are other people who have thought about
those problems. But thanks, anyway :-). (And actually
née polyglot.)

[Alexey]
> Well, my Antomega package does just the same thing, and I think it
> is better than Mem at many aspects :)

Right. After all, Mem is experimental while Antomega is
intended for actual use.

> However, there is a serious difference between Omega and XeTeX. With
> Omega most language-specific features have to be implemented using
> Omega's translation processes (OCP). These translation processes are
> very powerful by itself, but they have their own specifics: in
> particular, in order to use OCP's effectively, we usually should avoid
> TeX active characters in the input stream. For this reason Antomega
> focused mainly on adapting OCP's for those tasks where active characters
> have been traditionally used (e. g. Babel shorthands), so that
> OCP-related stuff actually represented the main part of the whole
> package.

The same can be said (more or less) about Mem, but
its aims are a lot broader in scope. In fact, Mem
began without OCPs at all and as a pure LaTeX package
named polyglot (to overcome the serious limitations
of babel), then adapted to Omega as Lambda and and
then adapted to Aleph as Mem. But what Mem intends
can be summarized in two words -- localization and
customization. Can it be adapted to XeTeX? I think
so. And to LuaTeX? Why not? So, it is essentially a
project in search of the right (or stable) driver ;-).

For more on Mem, please, see:

http://mem-latex.sourceforge.net/

Javier