[XeTeX] Conflict between xunicode and fontspec?

[François Charette]

Julien Élie and Jonathan Kew wrote:

>> <JE>
>> Well, I have just tried polyglossia:
>>
>> <...>
>>
>> Accents are good but I do not have the right spaces before "!"...
>> The first one is an unbreakable space and the second one is a normal
>> space.  And the result is that I have *two* spaces for the first one
>>     
> <JK>
> This sounds like polyglossia doesn't recognize the non-breaking space  
> as a "space", and so adds space of its own; I expect François can  
> update this.
>
>   
Sure, this should not be too difficult. I will look into this next 
week-end.

>> and different kinds of *one* space for the others.
>
> In the case of "test!", I think polyglossia is providing a \kern of a  
> certain width. Presumably "test !" and "test~!" simply give you the  
> standard space, which may not be the same.
>
>   
Indeed. I have not yet considered cases like "test !" and "test~!". 
Currently polyglossia expects the input to be "test!" and inserts the 
appropriate kerning, just as it was done in antomega by means of OTPs.

>> It is not good at all...
>>     

Bonjour Julien. Please bear with me! Polyglossia is only a few weeks old 
and has not even reached "alpha status"! I make the development version 
available on the svn server (and as a snapshot on mine) so that people 
like you can test it and point out bugs and omissions. Patches are of 
course most than welcome ;-)
And thanks for your "bug report" of course.

> If there are language-specific issues like space before footnotes  
> that polyglossia doesn't yet handle, I hope François will consider  
> adding support for these; 

At this stage only "basic" language-specific features are implemented. I 
have yet to look into more details at the "Pro" version of French 
support in Babel. I am prepared to make polyglossia eventually as 
feature-rich as Babel (or rather more so!), but in some cases this will 
take some time.

> I think this is a much better way forward  
> than trying to use combinations of old stuff (built for legacy byte  
> encodings and fonts) and the new Unicode mechanisms.
>   

I can only agree with that!


FC