[XeTeX] babel

[FC]

2012/9/4 Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at 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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