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I was recently surprised by a comment on a question, telling me that what I had thought was where the multilingual mainstream was "going" - namely xelatex and polyglossia - was actually not as favored, with lualatex and babel recommended. 5 or 6 years ago, it was the opposite: babel was considered more clunky and less system-font-friendly (for RTL languages at least), and it was hinted one might want to move away from pdfetex + babel.

This led me to the realization that I'm not really exposed to TeX-related news - even as a (less active) user on this site. I was wondering where I could read up on the "state of the TeX world" these days, but a bit of web searching led me to places like this:

https://www.rubbernews.com/events/2021-international-latex-conference

or even less relevant :-)

Now, I now there are some TeX-related journals, but I'm not interested in following closely or the deep technical details. This question is about the state and prognosis of major projects, central people/bodies involved etc.

einpoklum
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    this site is as good as any (that's mostly why I hang around here, to keep an eye on how things are really used, and whether things we put in to latex work in practice) – David Carlisle Jun 23 '21 at 20:56
  • I'm not persuaded that babel should be preferred over polyglossia. Yes, the former is the officially supported package, but it's also weighed down by backwards compatibility for 8-bit encodings (and backwards compatibility is a major concern for the TeX core people). – Don Hosek Jun 23 '21 at 22:04
  • Both babel and polyglossia work with xelatex and lualatex, and now that HarfBuzz font renderer is in both engines, there is not much difference font-wise between the two. Perhaps the question might resolve into: What news for those stuck with (constrained to) legacy fonts and 8-bit world? And those not? – Cicada Jun 24 '21 at 04:05

2 Answers2

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This is not an answer to your main question, but since you start with the current status of babel, I think some clarifications in this regard would be helpful.

In the babel site you can find the latest news with the most recent features, which are mainly for luatex because many of them are not possible with xetex. Here is a selection:

  • Support total or partial for about 250 languages, with basic templates for 500 more and a way to define easily new ones from scratch.
  • Non-standard hyphenation, including repeated hyphens, weighted rules...
  • Automatic directionality, with no explicit markup.
  • Arabic justification (still tentative, but it will be useable in the next release).
  • Counters for many languages.

See also the samples here:

https://github.com/latex3/babel/tree/main/samples

Javier Bezos
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Not the exact foci of the question, but browsing the contents of the compiled Latex Project News document, and the introduction paragraphs for some of the items, can give you some idea of where certain things are going.

einpoklum
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