[XeTeX] polyglossia and hebrew: arabic numerals and hyphenation

[Gareth Hughes]

Peter Dyballa wrote:
> 
> The xunicode package is useful when you try to use LaTeX constructs like
> \"u instead of Unicode characters. It also can have bad influence when
> used in an environment with bidi. In that case it's recommended to load
> bidi before xunicode. This means in your case to load polyglossia before
> xunicode.

I haven't had too much of an issue with the order of loading packages.
Knowing roughly what the issues are, means you can swap the order. I
usually use xltxtra to load fontspec and xunicode. Do I understand it
that I should habitually load polyglossia before xltxtra, so that, if
polyglossia invokes bidi, it will get loaded before xunicode? What
exactly is this bad influence, seeing as I have loaded bidi after
xunicode many times without catastrophe?

Gareth.