Hi!

We are typesetting a lot of academic texts which are mainly in English, but contain words in other languages/scripts. At the moment, I need to produce an article that contains individual words in traditional Chinese.

With pandoc, I currently face two issues:

First, chinese is not defined in Writers/LaTeX/Lang.hs. This means that, in contrast to other scripts, I cannot use `[言]{lang="zh-Hant"}`. For other languages that are defined, the LaTeX writer produces `\foreignlanguage{}{}` commands, but in this case it produces only `{言}`. Thus, the only possibility is to resort to `CJKmainfont`. The issue is that this switches on xeCJK for the whole document, which has undesirable side effects (mainly concerning spacing around punctuation characters). Thus, I have to introduce manual `\makexeCJKactive`/`\makexeCJKinactive` commands in my markdown source. For short passages of Chinese, it is actually desirable not to use xeCJK, but simply babel, as with other scripts.

Second, I do not see a way to define fonts for other scripts. The default LaTeX template calls `\babelprovide` for used fonts, but does not allow to define corresponding `\babelfont`s. With the old polyglossia system, IIRC, it was possible to use the `fontfamilies` metadata entry to define `\chinesefont` etc. for additional scripts. But this does no longer work with babel (if I’m not missing something).

So basically my question is twofold: First, how do I define additional fonts for foreign scripts with the new babel system, and second, would it be possible to support chinese script in the LaTeX writer in the same way it supports other scripts?

Thanks,

Frederik