Interesting package for XeTeX

Interesting package for XeTeX

[Thomas Schmitz]

Hi all,

on ctt, I just saw an annoucement for a xe(la)tex package 
which I found quite interesting. Here's the description:

Location on CTAN: /macros/xetex/latex/ucharclasses

This package addresses one of the few features where TeX 
still has to play catch-up to
word processing programs: automatic font switching for 
different languages. In fact, it
goes one better than word processing programs and comes 
with macros for inserting
arbitrary code between text from different unicode blocks, 
by making use of XeTeX's little
known "intercharclass" behaviour.

I was wondering: is something similar possible in mkiv 
yet? I know that with the font fallback mechanism, it's 
trivial to change fonts for unicode ranges, but is it 
possible to change hyphenation patterns (or even insert 
"arbitrary code") according to unicode blocks? Would be 
quite helpful for those of us working with different 
scripts.

All best

Thomas
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Re: Interesting package for XeTeX

[Hans Hagen]

On 21-12-2010 6:37, Thomas Schmitz wrote:

> I was wondering: is something similar possible in mkiv yet? I know that
> with the font fallback mechanism, it's trivial to change fonts for
> unicode ranges, but is it possible to change hyphenation patterns (or
> even insert "arbitrary code") according to unicode blocks? Would be
> quite helpful for those of us working with different scripts.

For latin an unicode block does not relate to a language so it would be 
broken by design to add such an automatism, however, for a while already 
it is possible in mkiv to load multiple patterns.

See mixed-001.tex in the test suits

\setuplanguage[ru][patterns={ru,us}]
\setuplanguage[en][patterns={us,ru}]
\setuplanguage[de][patterns={de,ru}]

I suppose that greek can also be happily mixed in as well (I suppose 
that's what you want).

Hans

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Re: Interesting package for XeTeX

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Tue, 21 Dec 2010 18:37:12 +0100 schrieb Thomas Schmitz:

> I know that with the font fallback mechanism, it's 
> trivial to change fonts for unicode ranges,

Do you know where (roughly) the code for the fallback is? I would
like to know how it work.
  
-- 
Ulrike Fischer 

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Re: Interesting package for XeTeX

[Thomas Schmitz]

On Wed, 22 Dec 2010 11:02:03 +0100
  Ulrike Fischer <news3@nililand.de> wrote:

> 
> Do you know where (roughly) the code for the fallback 
>is? I would
> like to know how it work.
>  
> -- 

You mean where it is actually defined in the core files? A 
quick grep for "fontfallback" shows that it's in 
font-ini.mkiv and font-ctx.lua.

Thomas
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