[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 <asyropoulos at 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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