[XeTeX] fontspec and languages

[mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Wed, 11 Sep 2013, Javier Bezos wrote:
> Something like that but not the internal default language, but
> a default value in \defaulfontfeatures if the key is not given
> (ie, "if there is no key 'Language', add 'Language=<current-language>'
> to the list").

It sounds like you want a second level of "really" default font features,
which won't be changed by \defaultfontfeatures.  I don't see a reason
for that to be specific to Language - to the extent this kind of feature
is useful, I think it could be equally useful for any font feature.  For
instance, I might want to set the directory that contains my font files
separately from other default features, and have it not change when
other defaults are changed, so that it'll be easier to relocate a document
to a different machine where the fonts are in a different directory.

Even if such a thing is implemented in fontspec, though, there'll still be
the possibility of users touching it when babel doesn't expect them to.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/